SUMMER AND autumn passed, and winter came. Neither Monsieur Leblanc nor the girl had set foot in the Luxembourg. Marius had but one thought, which was to see that enchanting face again. He had searched endlessly and everywhere, but without success. He had ceased to be the hot-headed dreamer of dreams, the bold challenger of fate, the youthful builder of futures, his mind teeming with castles in the air. He was like a stray dog, plunged in black despair. His life had become meaningless. Work disgusted him, walking tired him, solitude bored him; the vast world of Nature, hitherto so filled for him with light and meaning, with wide horizons and wise counsels, had become an emptiness. Everything, it seemed, had disappeared.
He still meditated, for he could not do otherwise, but he took no pleasure in his thoughts. To every notion that occurred to him, every plan that entered his mind, he had the same answer: what use is it?
He took himself endlessly to task. Why had he followed her, when it was such happiness simply to look at her? And she had looked back at him – was not that tremendous in itself? She had seemed to like him, and what more could he ask? What more could there have been? He had been ridiculous, it was his own doing … And so on. Courfeyrac, to whom he said nothing since it was against his nature to do so, but who guessed a good deal, that being his nature, had at first congratulated him, if with some astonishment, on having fallen in love; but then, seeing his state of misery, he said: ‘So you’re human, like the rest of us. Well, let’s go to the Chaumière.’
On one occasion, encouraged by the September sunshine, he had let himself be borne off to the Bal de Sceaux in company with Courfeyrac, Bossuet, and Grantaire. He had had a wild hope of seeing her there, but of course had not done so. ‘All the same, it’s a good place for finding lost women,’ Grantaire had murmured to the others. Marius had left them to their own pursuits and had walked back, lonely, weary and sad-eyed, outraged by the noise and dust of the carriages of singing revellers that passed him in the night, and seeking to cool his fevered blood by breathing in the sharp scent of the walnut trees lining the road.
He relapsed more and more into solitude, aimless and apathetic, immersed in his private suffering, twisting and turning within the walls of his grief like a wolf in a cage, searching still for what he had lost and made dull-witted by love.
An incident occurred which greatly startled him. In one of the narrow streets off the Boulevard du Luxembourg he passed a man in workman’s clothes wearing a peaked cap beneath which his very white hair was visible. Struck by the beauty of those white locks, Marius turned to look at him. The man was walking slowly as though preoccupied with a painful train of thought. And strangely, Marius seemed to recognize Monsieur Leblanc. The hair and profile were the same, as far as the cap allowed them to be seen, and his bearing in general was the same, except that he appeared more melancholy. But why the workman’s clothes? What was the meaning of that? Was it an intentional disguise? Marius was greatly astonished. When he had recovered from his surprise his immediate thought was to follow him and see where he went. But he had left it too late. The stranger had already vanished down a side-street and he could not catch up with him. This episode preoccupied Marius for several days, but then he dismissed it from his mind, reflecting that, after all, he had probably been mistaken.
Marius was still living in the Gorbeau tenement, indifferent to the people around him. As it happened, at that time the house was empty except for himself and the Jondrettes, the family of father, mother, and daughters whose rent he had once paid but to none of whom he had ever spoken. The other tenants had either gone elsewhere or died, or been turned out for non-payment of rent.
On one particular day that winter the sun shone for a little while during the afternoon; but it was 2 February, the ancient feast of Candlemas, when a treacherous sun, the precursor of six weeks’ cold weather, had inspired Canon Mathieu Loensberg of Liège to write the following lines, which have deservedly become classic:
Which may be rendered:
Whether it shines or pretends to shine,
The bear retreats to his den.
Marius emerged from his own den as darkness was falling. It was time for dinner, and – such alas is the weakness of romantic passion–he had been forced to revert to the habit of dining. He left the house in time to hear Ma’am Bougon, who was sweeping the doorstep, deliver herself of the following memorable observation:
‘So what’s cheap in these days? Everything costs more. Nothing’s cheap except toil and trouble, and you get those free of charge.’
Making for the Rue Saint-Jacques, Marius went slowly along the boulevard in the direction of the barrière, walking with his head bowed in thought. Suddenly he was jostled in the mist by two shabbily-dressed girls, breathlessly dashing in his direction as though they were running away from something, who bumped into him without seeing him. One was tall and thin, the other rather smaller. He had a glimpse of pale faces, dishevelled hair, tawdry bonnets, ragged skirts, and bare feet, and he caught a fragment of conversation as they passed.
The tall one was saying:
‘The cops came along. They near as anything got me.’
The other said:
‘I saw. I didn’t half run for it.’
From which Marius gathered that, young as they were, they had had a brush with the gendarmes or the city police but had managed to escape.
He stood for a moment staring after them as they disappeared under the trees of the boulevard. Then, as he was about to continue on his way, he noticed a small, greyish object lying on the ground near him. He picked it up. It was a wrapping of sorts, evidently containing papers.
One of the girls must have dropped it as they passed. He turned and called after them but failed to make them hear, and so eventually, putting the package in his pocket, he went on to dinner. In a narrow street leading into the Rue Mouffetard he saw a child’s coffin lying on three chairs, draped in black and lighted by a candle. The sight put him in mind of the two girls.
‘Unhappy mothers!’ he thought. ‘If there is anything worse than to see one’s children die it is to see them leading evil lives.’
Then dismissing these distracting shadows, and reverting to his own familiar griefs he fell to brooding again on his six months of love and happiness in the sunshine beneath the trees of the Luxembourg.
‘How sad my life has become,’ he reflected. ‘I’m always running into young girls. Once they seemed angelic; now they are creatures of darkness.’
When he undressed that night he found the package in his pocket, having forgotten about it, and it occurred to him that it might contain the girls’ address, or that of the owner if it was not they who had dropped it.
He undid the wrapping, which was not sealed, and found that it contained four letters, all addressed but also unsealed, and all smelling strongly of-cheap tobacco.
The first was addressed to Madame la Marquise de Grucheray, No. —, the Square behind the Chambre des Députés. Since it might contain the clue he was looking for, Marius felt justified in reading it. It ran as follows:
Madame la Marquise,
The virtues of compasion and piety are the bonds that most closely bind sosiety. I beg you to turn your Christian eyes upon an unfortunate Spaniard, the victim of his loyalty and devotion to the sacred cause of legitimacy, for which cause he has shed his blood and devoted his whole fortune and is now in desperate need. He does not doubt that your noble self will come to his aid to preserve the unhappy life of a soldier of education and honour and many wounds, counting upon your humanity and the sympathy which Madame la Marquise is known to feel for his suffering countrymen. Their prayer will not go unheard and their gratitude will cherish her memory.
I have the honour to sign myself, Madame, with expresions of the deepest respect,
Don Alvarez,
Captain in the Spanish cavalry, royalist refugee in France, travelling for his country’s sake but unable to get further through lack of funds.
No address followed the signature. Marius turned to the second letter, which was addressed to Madame la Contesse de Montvernet, 9, Rue Cassette.
Madame la Contesse,
I am the mother of six children, the last only eight months old, sick since my lying-in, diserted by my husband five months ago, in dredful poverty, not a penny in the world. I apeal to the charity of Madame la Contesse.
Yours obediantly,
Eve Balizard (wife and mother).
The third, like the others, was a begging-letter.
To Monsieur Pabourgeot, elector and wholesale milliner, Rue Saint-Denis, corner of the Rue aux Fers.
I venture to adress this letter to you to apeal for your favor and interest on behalf of a man of letters who has resently submited a play to the Théâtre-Français. The play is historical and takes place in Auvergne under the Empire. The style, I think, is natural and trenshant and, I believe, has some merit. There are verses for singing in four places. Comedy, drama and surprise are mingled with a variety of characters, with a flavor of romanticism throughout the plot which developes mysteriously with striking suprises in many brilliant scenes.
My principle aim is to satisfy the desire that progresively inspires the men of our century, namely, THE FASHION, that caprisious weathercock which changes with every change in the wind. But in spite of the merits of my play I fear that jealousy and the greed of established authors may cause it to be rejected, for I am well aware of the way they treat newcomers.
Knowing your reputation, dear Sir, as an enlightened defender of the Arts I make bold to send my daughter to call on you. She will depict for you our parlous situation, lacking food and warmth in this winter season. When I say that I beg you will allow me to dedicate this play and all the other plays I hope to write to your esteemed self, this will prove how ernestly I desire to put myself under your protection and embelish my writings with your name. If you will condesend to honor me with even the smallest gift I will at once compose a poem in token of my gratitude. This poem, which I will endeavour to make as perfect as possible, will be submited to you before being inserted at the beginning of the play and spoken on the stage.
With my most respectful regards,
Genflot, man of letters.P.S. Even as little as forty sous.
Excuse me sending my daughter and not coming myself. Alas, the insufficiency of my wardrobe prevents me going out.
The fourth letter was addressed to ‘The Benevolent Gentleman outside the church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas’.
Benevolent Sir,
If you will be so good as to acompany my daughter you will be the witnes of a shattered life and I will show you my certificates. This letter in itself will, I know, cause your generous spirit to be inspired with a sense of lively benevolense, for the truly philosophical are always a pray to strong emotions.
And you will agree, compasionate Sir, that only in the most cruel necesity will anyone take the painfull step of registering with the authorities, as though we were not free to suffer and die of starvation by ourselves while waiting for help in our distress. Fate is too cruel to some and too indulgent to others.
I await your visit or your gift, if you are so kind as to make me one, and beg you to acept the sentiments of profound respect with which I subscribe myself,
truly magnanimous Sir,
your most humble and obedient servant,
P. Fabantou, artist of the drama.
Having read the four letters, Marius found that he had not discovered what he wanted to know, since none bore the address of the writer. However, they were interesting in other respects. Although they purported to come from four different people, all were in the same handwriting, written on the same coarse, yellowed paper and impregnated with the same smell of tobacco. Moreover, although an attempt had clearly been made to vary the style, all contained similar spelling mistakes, the ‘man of letters’, Genflot, being no more exempt from these than the Spanish captain. It was impossible not to suppose that they were written by the same person.
But to attempt to solve this trifling mystery, which might have had the appearance of a practical joke if he had not come upon the package by accident, would be a waste of time. Marius was in too dejected a state to enter into the spirit of this diversion proposed to him by the streets of Paris, as though he were the blind man in a game of‘ blind man’s buff’ with the four letters. There was nothing to indicate that they were the property of the two girls who had jostled him on the boulevard, and they were, in any event, evidently documents of no value. He wrapped them up again, tossed them into a corner and went to bed.
At about seven the next morning, by which time he had dressed and breakfasted and was trying to settle down to work, there was a tap on his door.
Since he had almost no possessions Marius was in the habit of leaving his door unlocked, except, as happened very occasionally, when he had urgent work to do. He left the key in the lock even when he went out. ‘You’ll be robbed,’ Ma’am Bougon said. ‘What of?’ said Marius. But the fact remained that he had once been robbed of an old pair of boots, much to her satisfaction.
There was a second knock, as tentative as the first.
‘Come in,’ said Marius without looking up from the papers on his writing-table. ‘What is it, Ma’am Bougon?’
But the voice that answered, saying, ‘I beg your pardon, Monsieur,’ was not that of Ma’am Bougon. It was more like the voice of a bronchitic old man, half-stifled, rendered husky as though by the drinking of spirits.
Marius looked up sharply and saw that his visitor was a girl.
A quite young girl was standing in the open doorway, facing the pallid light of the one small window in Marius’s garret, which was opposite the door. She was a lean and delicate-looking creature, her shivering nakedness clad in nothing but a chemise and skirt. Her waistband was a piece of string, and another piece tied back her hair. Bony shoulders emerged from the chemise, and the face above them was sallow and flabby. The light fell upon reddened hands, a stringy neck, a loose, depraved mouth lacking several teeth, bleared eyes both bold and wary: in short, an ill-treated girl with the eyes of a grown woman; a blend of fifty and fifteen; one of those creatures, at once weak and repellent, who cause those who set eyes on them to shudder when they do not weep.
Marius had risen to his feet and was gazing in a sort of stupefaction at what might have been one of those figures of darkness that haunt our dreams. But what was tragic about the girl was that she had not been born ugly. She might even have been pretty as a child, and the grace proper to her age was still at odds with the repulsive premature ageing induced by loose living and poverty. A trace of beauty still lingered in the sixteen-year-old face, like pale sunlight fading beneath the massed clouds of a winter’s dawn.
The face was not quite unfamiliar to Marius. He had a notion that he had seen her before.
‘What can I do for you, Mademoiselle?’
She answered in her raucous voice:
‘I’ve got a letter for you, Monsieur Marius.’
So she knew his name. But how did she come to know it?
Without awaiting any further invitation she walked in, looking about her with a pathetic boldness at the untidy room with its unmade bed. Long bare legs and bony knees were visible through the vents in her skirt, and she was shivering.
As he took the letter Marius noted that the large wafer sealing it was still damp. It could not have come very far. He read:
My warm-hearted neighbour, most estimable young man!
I have heard of the kindness you did me in paying my rent six months ago. I bless you for it. My elder daughter will tell you that for two days we have been without food, four of us, including my sick wife. If I am not deceived in my trust in humanity I venture to hope that your generous heart will be moved by our afliction and that you will relieve your feelings by again coming to my aid.
I am, with the expression of the high esteem we all owe to a benefactor of humanity,
Yours truly,
Jondrette.P.S. My daughter is at your service, dear Monsieur Marius.
This missive threw an immediate light on the problem that had been perplexing Marius. All was now clear. It came from the same source as the other letters – the same handwriting, the same spelling, the same paper, even the same smell of rank tobacco. He now had five letters, all the work of one author. The Spanish Captain, the unhappy Mère Balizard, the dramatist Genflot, and the aged actor, Fabantou, all were Jondrette – if, indeed, that was his real name.
As we have said, during the time Marius had been living in the tenement he had paid little or no attention even to his nearest neighbours, his thoughts being elsewhere. Although he had more than once encountered members of the Jondrette family in the corridor or on the stairs, they had been to him no more than shadows of whom he had taken so little notice that he had failed to recognize the two daughters when they bumped into him on the boulevard; even now, in the shock of his pity and repugnance, he had difficulty in realizing that this must be one of them.
But now he saw it all. He realized that the business of his neighbour, Jondrette, was the writing of fraudulent begging letters under a variety of names to persons of supposed wealth and benevolence whose addresses he had managed to secure, and that these letters were delivered, at their own peril, by his daughters: for he had sunk so low that he treated the two young girls as counters in his gamble with life. To judge by the episode of the previous evening, their breathless flight and the words he had overheard, the girls were engaged in other sordid pursuits. What it came to was that in the heart of our society, as at present constituted, two unhappy mortals, neither children nor grown women, had been turned by extreme poverty into monsters at once depraved and innocent, drab creatures without name or age or sex, no longer capable of good or evil, deprived of all freedom, virtue, and responsibility; souls born yesterday and shrivelled today like flowers dropped in the street which lie fading in the mud until a cartwheel comes to crush them.
Meanwhile, while Marius watched her in painful astonishment, the girl was exploring the room like an audacious ghost, untroubled by her state of near nakedness in the ragged chemise which at moments slipped down almost to her waist. She moved chairs, examined the toilet-articles on the chest of drawers, fingered Marius’s clothes and peered into corners.
‘Well, fancy! You’ve got a mirror,’ she said.
She was humming to herself as though she were alone, snatches of music-hall songs, cheerful ditties which her raucous, tuneless voice made dismal. But beneath this show of boldness there was a hint of unease and awkward constraint. Effrontery is an expression of shame. Nothing could have been more distressing than to see her fluttering about the room like a bird startled by the light or with a broken wing. It was plain that in other circumstances of background and education her natural, uninhibited gaiety might have made of her something sweet and charming. In the animal world no creature born to be a dove turns into a scavenger. This happens only among men.
Marius sat pondering while he watched her. She drew near to his writing-table.
‘Books!’ she said.
A light dawned in her clouded eyes. She announced, with the pride in attainment from which none of us is immune: ‘I know how to read.’
Picking up a book that lay open on the table she read, without much difficulty:
‘General Bauduin was ordered to seize and occupy, with the five battalions of his brigade, the Château de Hougomont, which is in the middle of the plain of Waterloo …’
She broke off and exclaimed:
‘Waterloo! I know about that. It’s an old battle. My father was there. My father was in the army. We’re all real Bonapartists in our family. Waterloo was against the English.’ She put the book down and took up a pen. ‘I can write, too.’ She dipped the pen in the ink and looked at Marius. ‘You want to see? I’ll write something to show you.’
Before he could say anything she had written on a blank sheet lying on the table: ‘Watch out, the bogies are around.’ She laid down the pen. ‘No spelling mistakes. You can see for yourself. We’ve had some schooling, my sister and me. We haven’t always been what we are now. We weren’t brought up to be –’
But here she stopped and gazing with her dulled eyes at Marius she burst out laughing. In a tone in which the extreme of anguish was buried beneath the extreme of cynicism, she exclaimed, ‘What the hell!’
She began to hum again and then said:
‘Do you ever go to the theatre, Monsieur Marius? I do. I’ve a young brother who knows one or two actors and he gives me tickets. I don’t like the gallery, the benches are uncomfortable and it’s too crowded and there are people who smell nasty.’
She fell to examining Marius and said with a coy look:
‘Do you know, Monsieur Marius, that you’re a very handsome boy?’
The words prompted the same thought in both their minds, causing her to smile and him to blush. Drawing nearer, she laid a hand on his shoulder.
‘You never notice me, Monsieur Marius, but I know you by sight. I see you on the stairs, and I’ve seen you visiting an old man called Père Mabeuf in the Austerlitz quarter when I’ve been that way. It suits you, you know, having your hair untidy.’
She was striving to make her voice soft but could only make it sound more guttural, and some of the words got lost in their passage from her throat to her lips, as on a piano with some of the notes missing. Marius drew gently away.
‘I think, Mademoiselle,’ he said with his accustomed cold gravity, ‘that I have something belonging to you. Allow me to return it.’
He handed her the wrapping containing the four letters. She clapped her hands and cried:
‘We looked for that everywhere!’
Seizing it eagerly, she began to unfold it, talking as she did so:
‘Heavens, if you knew how we’d searched, my sister and me! And so you’re the one who found it. On the boulevard, wasn’t it? It must have been. We were running, and my sister went and dropped it, the silly kid, and when we got home we found it was gone. So because we didn’t want to be beaten, because where’s the sense in it, what earthly good does it do, it’s simply stupid, we said we’d delivered the letters to the people they were written to and they hadn’t coughed up anything. And here they are, the wretched letters. How did you know they were mine? Oh, of course, the handwriting. So you’re the person we bumped into yesterday evening? It was too dark to see. I said to my sister, “Was it a gentleman?” and she said, “I think it was.”’
By now she had fished out the letter addressed to ‘The Benevolent Gentleman outside the church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas’.
‘Ah, this is for the old boy who goes to Mass. Well, it’s nearly time so I’d better run along and catch him. Perhaps he’ll give me enough for our dinner.’ She burst out laughing again. ‘And do you know what that will mean? It will be breakfast and dinner for yesterday and the day before – the first meal for three days. Well, who cares? If you don’t like it you’ve got to lump it.’
This reminded Marius of why she had called upon him. He felt in his waistcoat pockets, while she went on talking as though she had forgotten his existence.
‘Sometimes I go out at night and don’t come home. Last winter, before coming here, we lived under the bridges. You had to huddle together not to freeze and it made my little sister cry. Water’s dreadful, isn’t it? Sometimes I wanted to drown myself, but then I thought, No, it’s too cold. I go off on my own when I feel like it and sleep in a ditch, likely as not. You know, at night when I’m walking along the boulevards the trees look to me like pitchforks, and the houses, they’re so tall and black, like the towers of Notre-Dame, and when you come to a strip of white wall it’s like a patch of water. And the stars are like street lamps and you’d think they were smoking, and sometimes the wind blows them out and I’m always surprised, as though a horse had come and snorted in my ear; and although it’s night-time I think I can hear street-organs and the rattle of looms, all kinds of things. And sometimes I think people are throwing stones at me and I run away and everything goes spinning round me. When you’ve had nothing to eat it’s very queer.’
She was gazing absently at him. Marius, exploring his pockets, had now succeeded in retrieving a five-franc piece and sixteen sous, all the money he possessed at that moment. Enough for today’s dinner, he reflected, and as for tomorrow, we’ll hope for the best. So he kept the sixteen sous and offered her the five francs.
‘The sun’s come out at last!’ she cried, eagerly accepting the coin; and as though the sun had power to release a torrent of the popular jargon that was her every day speech she declaimed:
‘Well, if that isn’t prime! Five jimmy-o’-goblins! Enough to stuff us for two days. You’re a true nobleman, mister, and I tips my lid to you. Tripe and sausage and the tipple to wash it down for two whole blooming days.’ Hitching up her chemise and making Marius a profound curtsey, she turned with a wave of her hand towards the door. ‘Well, good day to you, mister, and your humble servant. I’ll be getting back to the gaffer.’
On her way to the door she noticed a crust of stale bread gathering dust on the chest of drawers. She snatched it up and started to devour it.
‘It’s good, it’s tough – something to get your teeth into!’
And she departed.
Marius had lived through five years of penury and deprivation, sometimes of great hardship; but, as he perceived, he had never known the real meaning of poverty, utter destitution, until he encountered it in the person of that girl. To witness the abjection of men is not enough: one must also witness the abjection of women: and even this pales before the abjection of a child.
People reduced to the last extremity of need are also driven to the utmost limit of their resources, and woe to any defenceless person who comes their way. Work and wages, food and warmth, courage and goodwill – all this is lost to them. The daylight dwindles into shadow and darkness enters their hearts; and within this darkness man seizes upon the weakness of woman and child and forces them into ignominy. No horror is then excluded. Desperation is bounded only by the flimsiest of walls, all giving access to vice and crime.
Health and youth, honour and the sacred, savage delicacy of still-young flesh, truth of heart, virginity, modesty, those protective garments of the soul, all are put to the vilest of uses in the blind struggle for survival that must encounter, and submit to, every outrage. Fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, brothers, men and women alike merge into a composite, like a mineral alloy, in the murky promiscuity of sexes, relationships, ages, infamy and innocence. They huddle together, back to back, in a kind of spiritual hovel, exchanging glances of lamentable complicity. How pale they are, those unfortunates, how cold they are! They might be the inhabitants of a planet far more distant from the sun than our own.
To Marius the girl was in some sort an emissary of that underworld, disclosing a hideous aspect of its darkness. He was near to reproaching himself for his habit of abstraction and for the love-affair which until then had prevented him from giving a thought to his neighbours. The payment of their rent had been an automatic response, an impulse that might have occurred to anyone; he, Marius, should have done better. Only a thin partition separated him from that small cluster of lost souls groping in darkness and sundered from the living world; he had heard them living, or rather suffering, within a few yards of him – and he had paid no attention. All day and every day he had been conscious of their movements through the wall as they came and went and talked together, and he had not listened. Groans had been mingled with the words they spoke, but he had not heeded them. His thoughts had been elsewhere, squandered in dreams, infatuation, while these, his fellow-creatures and brothers in Christ, were slowly rotting beside him, abandoned to their agony. Indeed, it seemed to him that he was a part of their misfortune and had aggravated it. If they had had a different neighbour, one less self-absorbed and more concerned for others, a man of normal, charitable instincts, their desperate state would not have gone unnoticed, their distress-signals would have been heard, and perhaps they would have been rescued by now. Certainly they appeared utterly depraved, corrupt, vile and odious; but it is rare for those who have sunk so low not to be degraded in the process, and there comes a point, moreover, where the unfortunate and the infamous are grouped together, merged in a single, fateful word. They are les misérables– the outcasts, the underdogs. And who is to blame? Is it not the most fallen who have most need of charity?
While he thus lectured himself – for there were times when, like all truly honest persons, he was his own schoolmaster and took himself to task more sternly than he deserved – Marius was staring at the wall which separated him from the Jondrettes, as though by the act of doing so the warmth of his pitying gaze might be made to pass through it and comfort their distress. The wall was in fact no more than a lath-and-plaster partition with a few upright posts, through which, as we have said, every movement and sound of voices could be distinctly heard. Only a dreamer like Marius could have been unconscious of the fact. It was not papered on either side, so that its crude nakedness was apparent. Half-unconsciously Marius examined it while still pursuing his train of thought. Suddenly he stood up. In the upper part of the wall, near the ceiling, there was a triangular hole between three laths where the plaster had crumbled away. By standing on the chest of drawers one could see through it into the Jondrette’s garret. Curiosity is, and must be, a part of compassion. The hole was like a Judas-window. It is lawful to take surreptitious note of misfortune for the purpose of relieving it. ‘Let us see what these people are like,’ said Marius, ‘and how bad things really are.’
He got up on the chest of drawers, put his eye to the aperture and looked through.
Cities, like forests, have their retreats in which the most evil and fearful of their denizens lurk in hiding. But whereas the dwellers in city dens are ferocious, malignant, and small – in a word, ugly – those in the forest lairs are fierce, wild, and generally large – that is to say, beautiful. All things considered, the animal den is preferable to the human den. A cave is better than a city slum.
What Marius was peering into was the latter.
Marius was poor and his own room was a barren place, but, as his poverty was high-minded so was his garret clean. The dwelling into which he looked was filthy, squalid, evil-smelling, and altogether noisome. Its only furnishings were a wicker chair, a rickety table, a few cracked dishes and, in opposite corners, two frowzy trucklebeds; its only lighting came through the grimy, cobwebbed panes of a small dormer-window which admitted just sufficient light to make the face of a man look like that of a ghost. The walls had a leprous appearance, being covered with cracks and scars like a human face disfigured by some repellent disease, oozing with damp, and inscribed here and there with crudely obscene drawings in charcoal.
Marius’s room had a flooring of worn tiles; this place had no flooring other than the original rough-cast of the building, now blackened by the tread of feet; dust was, so to speak, incrusted in the rough surface, which was virgin soil only in the sense that it had never been touched by a broom, and it was littered with squalid garments and old worn footgear. For the rest, the room had a fireplace, on account of which it was rented for forty francs a year, and this open hearth housed a great variety of objects – a cooking-stove, a stew-pan, some sticks of firewood, rags hanging on nails, a birdcage, ashes and even a small fire, of which the embers were sullenly smoking.
The generally repellent appearance of the garret was enhanced by the fact that it was large, a big, irregularly-shaped place of projections and recesses, nooks and crannies, the ups and downs of its attic roof, dark corners which looked as though they must harbour spiders big as a man’s fist, cockroaches long as his foot, perhaps even human monstrosities.
The two beds were on either side of the fireplace, one by the door and the other by the window, both facing Marius. From his point of observation he could see, hanging on the wall in a black wooden frame, a coloured engraving at the foot of which, in large letters, were the words, THE DREAM. It depicted a sleeping woman with a sleeping child on her lap. Above them hovered an eagle in a cloud carrying a crown in its beak, and the woman was thrusting the crown away from the child’s head, without, however, awakening. In the background was the figure of Napoleon enveloped in radiance and leaning against a pillar inscribed as follows:
Below this picture something that looked like a wooden panel, taller than it was broad, and which appeared to have been wrenched off some building, stood leaning against the wall, presenting its rough, reverse side to the beholder, as though it, too, had some kind of daub painted on its other side and was waiting to be hung.
Seated at the table, on which Marius could see a pen, paper, and ink, was a man of about sixty, small, lean, sallow-faced, and haggard, with an expression of restless, venomous and wary cunning. A most unpleasant rogue. Lavater, the physiognomist, would have seen in him a combination of vulture and prosecuting attorney, one complementing the other, the man of legal trickery making the bird of prey ignoble, and the bird making the trickster repellent. He had a long, grey beard. He was clad above the waist in a woman’s chemise, exposing a shaggy chest and arms covered with grey hair, and below the waist in muddied trousers and a pair of top-boots from which his toes protruded.
He was smoking a pipe (there might be no food in the place, but there was still tobacco!) and busily writing – doubtless a letter similar to those Marius had already seen. A battered volume lying on the table proclaimed by its russet binding that it was one of a standard edition of popular fiction issued for the use of public libraries. The title, printed in large capital letters, was: God, the King, Honour and the Ladies by Ducray-Dumeuil, 1814.
The man was talking while he wrote.
‘Equalityl There’s no such blooming thing even when you’re dead. You’ve only got to go to Père-Lachaise. The fine folk, anyone who can pay, they’re up at the top, round the acacia alley, where it is paved. They can be driven there in hearses. But the small fry, the paupers, they’re down at the bottom where there’s no paving, no drams, nothing but mud. They stick ’em in there so they’ll rot the quicker. If you want to visit their graves you walk in mud up to the knees.’ He broke off to pound with his fist on the table, and said savagely: ‘I’d like to eat the whole bloody lot!’
A burly woman who might have been aged forty or a hundred was squatting on bare heels by the fireplace. She, too, was clad only in chemise and a tattered skirt, patched with odd fragments of material and half-hidden beneath a coarse apron. Although she was in a crouching position she was evidently a very tall woman, a giantess by comparison with her husband. She had dingy russet hair, turning grey, which she constantly pushed back with a large, greasy stubby-fingered hand. A book lay open on the floor beside her, similar in format to the one on the table and probably another volume of the same romance.
On one of the truckle-beds a skinny, pale-faced child, almost naked, was seated with her legs dangling, seeming not to see or hear anything, or even to be alive. This was presumably the younger sister of the one who had called on Marius. At first sight she appeared to be no more than eleven or twelve, but a second glance showed that she was at least fifteen. It must be she who had said, ‘I didn’t half run for it!’
She was one of those children who, being at first retarded, suddenly and rapidly mature, sickly human plants nurtured in poverty who have known neither childhood nor adolescence. At fifteen they look twelve years old, and at sixteen they look twenty, little girls one day and women the next, as though they were racing through life to be done with it the sooner. For the present, she still looked like a child.
There was nothing in the room to indicate that any work was ever done there, no tool or implement of any trade except a few dubious-looking metal objects lying in one corner. It was pervaded with the apathy that succeeds despair and precedes the death-agony, and Marius, looking down into it, found it more dreadful to contemplate than the grave itself, for it still harboured life and the living spirit. The garret and the cellar, those ditches sheltering the poorest dregs of humanity, are not the tomb but its antechamber; they are a vestibule where Death, closing in upon them, seems to parade his choicest terrors, as the rich display their greatest splendours at the entrance to their palaces.
The man had fallen silent, the woman had not spoken and the girl seemed not to be breathing. There was silence, broken only by the scratching of the pen, until the man exclaimed, without ceasing to write:
‘Filth, filth, all is filth!’
This variation of the ‘All is vanity’ of the preacher drew a sigh from the woman.
‘There, there, my dear, you mustn’t get upset. It’s beneath you to be writing to all these people.’
Bodies huddle close together in poverty as they do in cold, but hearts grow distant. To all appearances this woman must once have bestowed on the man all the love of which she was capable; but it was probable that the bickerings of daily life in the loathsome circumstances to which they were reduced had extinguished her love, leaving only its ashes. Nevertheless, as often happens, the forms of affection remained. She still addressed him as ‘dear’ and ‘love’, but they were words spoken with the lips, not from the heart.
He went on with his writing.
Marius, with a heavy heart, was about to get down from his post of observation when a sound caused him to stay where he was. The door opened abruptly and the elder girl came in.
She was wearing a pair of large men’s shoes encrusted with the mud that had splashed over her ankles, and a tattered cloak which she had not worn when she visited Marius but had perhaps deliberately discarded, the better to win his compassion. Slamming the door behind her she paused to get her breath, for she had evidently been running, and then cried in triumph:
‘He’s coming!’
Her father and mother looked up at her, but the younger girl did not move.
‘Who’s coming?’ the father asked.
‘The old gent, the philanthropist from the Église Saint-Jacques.’
‘He’s really coming?’
‘He’s following me.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Of course I’m sure. He’s coming in a fiacre.’
‘A fiacre! Good God, he must be a Rothschild!’
The man had risen to his feet.
‘But how can you be sure? If he’s coming in a fiacre, how did you manage to get here ahead of him? Did he get the address right? Did you tell him it’s the last door on the right at the end of the corridor? Let’s hope he doesn’t make any mistake. You found him in the church, did you? Did he read my letter? What did he say?’
‘The way you go on!’ said the girl. ‘Well, look. I found him in his usual place in the church, and I made him a bob and gave him your letter, and he read it and said, “Where do you live, child?” So I said, “I’ll take you there, Monsieur,” but he said no, his daughter had some shopping to do, if I’d give him the address he’d hire a cab and be here the same time as me. So I told him the address and he looked surprised. He sort of hesitated, but then he said, “Well, I’ll come anyway. “I saw him and his daughter leave the church and get into a fiacre, and I did tell him about it being the door at the end of the corridor.’
‘That doesn’t prove he’s coming.’
‘But I’ve just seen the fiacre in the Rue du Petit-Banquier. That’s when I started to run.’
‘How do you know it was the same fiacre?’
‘Because I remembered the number.’
‘What number?’
‘440.’
‘Good. You’re a bright child.’
The girl gazed boldly at her father and looking down at her footgear said:
‘Bright I may be, but I’m blessed if I’ll wear these foul shoes again, they’re unhealthy as well as filthy, and I don’t know anything nastier than soles that flap and make a squelching noise with every step you take. I’d sooner go barefoot.’
‘I don’t blame you, my dear,’ her father said with a gentleness of tone that was in marked contrast to her own sharpness. ‘But they wouldn’t let you inside a church. The poor have to have shoes. You can’t visit God barefoot,’ he added in a bitter aside, and then reverted to the main subject. ‘But you’re absolutely sure he’s coming?’
‘He’s on my heels,’ she said.
The man drew himself to his full height while a sort of radiance spread over his face.
‘Wife,’ he said, ‘do you hear? The philanthropist is coming. Put out the fire!’
She stared at him bemusedly without moving. Darting with the nimbleness of an acrobat, he seized a broken jug standing on the mantelshelf and poured water on the embers. Then he said to the older girl:
‘Strip that chair!’
She, too, failed to understand. Seizing the chair, he stripped it of its seat by thrusting a foot through the straw.
‘Bitterly cold. It’s snowing.’
He turned to the younger girl, seated on the bed by the window, and bellowed at her:
‘Move, you idle slut. Can’t you ever do anything? Get down to the end of the bed and smash a window-pane.’
She moved to the end of the bed and huddled there, shivering.
‘Smash a window-pane?’
‘You heard what I said.’
She stood up on the bed. By standing on tip-toe she could just reach the dormer window. In terrified obedience she punched it with her fist, and the pane broke and fell with a clatter to the floor.
‘Good.’ The man stood intently surveying the room like a general studying the field of a forthcoming battle. The woman, who had so far not uttered a word, now stood up and said in low slurred accents, as though she had difficulty in speaking:
‘My dear, what is all this for?’
‘Get into bed,’ he answered.
The peremptory tone admitted of no dispute. She flung herself heavily on their bed. At that moment a sob was heard.
‘Now what’s the matter?’ the man demanded.
The younger girl, without emerging from the darkness of the corner where she was now crouched, held up a bleeding arm. She had taken refuge by her mother’s bed and was crying. It was the mother’s turn to start upright
‘There – you see! All this silliness! She’s cut herself breaking the window-pane.’
‘Good. I thought she would.’
‘What do you mean – good?’
‘Shut up,’ said the man. ‘I’ve abolished the liberty of the press.’ Tearing a strip off the woman’s chemise he was wearing, he rapidly bandaged the child’s wrist. ‘Better and better,’ he said. ‘Now we’ve got a torn shirt as well.’
An icy breeze was blowing in, bringing with it a mist which spread through the room like cotton-wool unravelled by invisible fingers. Through the broken pane they could see the snow falling. The intense cold presaged by the Candlemas sunset was now upon them. Gazing about him to make sure that nothing had been overlooked, the man picked up a worn shovel and scattered dry ash over the wetted embers to hide them. Then, standing with his back to the fireplace, he announced:
‘Now we’re ready for the philanthropist.’
The older girl reached out a hand to her father.
‘Feel how cold I am,’ she said.
‘Rubbish,’ he answered. ‘I’m much colder than you.’
The woman burst out:
‘Whatever it is, you’re always worse off than anybody else!’
‘Hold your tongue,’ he said, and the look he gave her reduced her to silence.
A lull ensued. The older girl casually scraped mud off the hem of her cloak while the younger one continued to sob. Her mother had taken her head in her hands and was kissing her while she said in a low voice:
‘It’s nothing, darling. Don’t cry. You’ll make your father cross.’
‘Not a bit of it,’ the father said. ‘Nothing of the kind. Cry as much as you like. Go on – cry!’ He turned to his elder daughter. ‘It’s all very fine,’ he said, ‘but he still hasn’t arrived. Suppose he doesn’t come? I’ll have put out the fire, knocked the bottom out of a chair, ripped up a chemise, and smashed a window all for nothing.’
‘Besides hurting your child,’ the mother said.
‘This place is as cold as an ice-house. Suppose he doesn’t come after all! He certainly doesn’t mind keeping us waiting. He’s probably thinking, “Let ‘em wait – that’s all they’re fit for.” Oh, God, how I hate them! I’d like to strangle the lot of ‘em, the rich, the so-called charitable rich, living in clover and going to Mass, and dishing out sops and pious sentiments. They think they’re our lords and masters and they come and patronize us and bring us their cast-off clothes and a few scraps to eat. Bastards! That isn’t what I want. Money’s what I want, and money’s what they never give us. They say we’ll just spend it on drink, that we’re all sots and loafers. And what about them? Where did they spring from, for God’s sake? Thieves, that’s what they were, otherwise they’d never have got rich. I’d like to take the whole blasted works and stand it on its head. Perhaps everything would get smashed up, but at least it would mean that everybody would be in the same boat and we’d be that much to the good … But what’s he doing, this philanthropist of yours? Is he coming? Perhaps the old imbecile has forgotten the address. I don’t mind betting –’
At this moment there was a light tap on the door. The man dashed to open it, bowing almost to the ground as he did so.
‘Please come in, my dear sir! My noble benefactor, please enter, with your charming young lady.’
An elderly man and a young girl appeared in the doorway; and Marius, still at his peep-hole, was seized with a wonderment that it is beyond the power of words to describe.
It was She.
She! Everyone who has ever loved will feel the force of that small word. In the luminous mist that suddenly clouded his vision Marius could scarcely distinguish her features – the eyes, forehead, and mouth, the sweet face that had lighted his life for six months and then vanished, plunging him in darkness. And now the vision had reappeared – in this setting of unspeakable squalor!
He was trembling, his heart beating so wildly that his sight was troubled and he felt himself to be on the verge of tears. To be seeing her again after having searched for so long! It was as though he had lost his soul and now found it restored to him.
She was unchanged except that she seemed a little pale. Her face was enclosed in a hood of purple velvet, and she was wearing a black satin cloak and a long skirt beneath which a neat anklebone was visible. Her companion, as usual, was Monsieur Leblanc. On entering the room she had deposited a large parcel on the table.
The Jondrette woman, huddled on the bed behind the door, was glowering at the hood and the cloak and that delightful, happy face.
The garret was so dark that to anyone coming from outside it was like entering a cavern. The newcomers therefore moved uncertainly, scarcely able to distinguish the objects around them, whereas they themselves were entirely visible to the denizens of the cavern, whose eyes were accustomed to the half-light. Monsieur Leblanc, with his kind, melancholy gaze turned to Jondrette, said:
‘Monsieur, you will find a few things in the parcel – woollen stockings and blankets and suchlike.’
‘Most noble sir, you overwhelm me,’ said Jondrette, again bowing to the ground. But while the visitors were gazing about them, examining their lamentable surroundings, he muttered in a rapid aside to his elder daughter: ‘What did I tell you? A bundle of clothes, nothing about money. They’re all the same. Incidentally, the letter you gave the old fool – how was it signed?’
‘Fabantou.’
‘Ah, the dramatic artist.’
He had asked only just in time, for at this moment Monsieur Leblanc turned back to him and said uncertainly:
‘I see that you are greatly to be pitied, Monsieur –’ and he paused.
‘Fabantou,’ said Jondrette promptly.
‘Ah, yes, Monsieur Fabantou.’
‘An actor, Monsieur, who has had some success in his time.’ And Jondrette, evidently considering that the moment had come to assert himself, proceeded in a voice that mingled the stridency of a fairground busker with the abjectness of a street-corner beggar. ‘A former pupil of Talma, Monsieur, the great Talma himself! Fortune smiled upon me once, but now, alas, I am overwhelmed with misfortune. We are without food, Monsieur, and without heating. No warmth for my unhappy children. Our only chair without a seat. A broken window – in this weather! And my wife ill in bed.’
‘Poor woman,’ said Monsieur Leblanc.
‘And our younger daughter injured,’ said Jondrette.
The child, distracted by the newcomers, was so absorbed in contemplating the young lady that her sobs had ceased.
‘Bawl, can’t you?’ muttered Jondrette under his breath, and, operating with the dexterity of a pickpocket, he gave her wrist a smart pinch. It drew a loud yell from her, and the lovely girl whom Marius had christened Ursula started forward.
‘Oh, the poor child!’ she exclaimed.
‘You can see for yourself, dear young lady,’ said Jondrette. ‘Her wrist is bleeding. She had an accident in the machine-shop where she works at six sous an hour. They may have to cut off her arm.’
‘Is that really so?’ asked the old gentleman in consternation, and the daughter, taking it seriously, yelled louder than ever.
‘Alas, I fear so,’ her father said.
For some moments Jondrette had been gazing intently at the ‘philanthropist’, seeming to study his face while he talked, as though he were trying to remember something. Taking advantage of the fact that the visitors were now questioning the child about her injury, he darted to the side of his wife, who was huddled apathetically on her bed, and said in a whisper:
‘Take a good look at this man.’
He then returned to Monsieur Leblanc and resumed his lament.
‘You see how it is, Monsieur. The only rag of clothing I possess is this torn chemise belonging to my wife – in the middle of winter! I can’t go out for lack of clothes. If I had a coat I’d go and see Mademoiselle Mars, who is an old and dear friend. Is she still living in the Rue de la Tour-des-Dames? We played together in the provinces, Monsieur. I shared in her triumphs. Célimène would come to my assistance, Monsieur! Elmira would lend Belisarius a helping hand! But I’ve nothing to wear and not a sou in the house. My wife sick, my child dangerously injured and not a sou. My wife has fits of giddiness. It’s her time of life, and the nervous system has something to do with it. She needs treatment and so does my daughter, but who’s to pay the doctor and the apothecary? I’d go on my knees for a penny-piece! And do you know, my sweet young lady, and you, my generous protector, who breathe the air of virtue and kindness and lend distinction to the church where my daughter sees you every day when she is at her devotions … Because I have taught my children religion, Monsieur. I have never wanted them to go on the stage. They have been strictly brought up, and no backsliding! I make no bones about that. The times I’ve lectured them on honour and virtue and morality. You have only to ask them. They know how to behave. They have a father to reckon with. They are not to be numbered among the unfortunates who because they have no family end by becoming public property – Mamselle Nobody who ends up Madame Anybody. There’s none of that in the Fabantou family. They have been taught virtue and honesty and proper conduct and faith in God!… And do you know, most worthy sir, what is going to happen to us tomorrow? Tomorrow, the fourth of February, is the terrible day, the last day our landlord will allow us. If by this evening I have not paid in full we shall all be turned out – my sick wife and I, our elder daughter and our injured child – turned out into the street without shelter from the snow and rain! That is the position, Monsieur. I owe four quarters’ rent, a whole year, making sixty francs!’
This was a blatant lie. The four quarters would have come to only forty francs, and he could not owe as many as four, since Marius, less than six months previously, had paid the two that were then outstanding. MonsieurLeblanc got a five-franc piece out of his pocket and laid it on the table; and Jondrette found a moment to whisper in his daughter’s ear:
‘See that? The bastard! What the devil’s the good of five francs? It won’t even pay for the chair and window-pane.’
Monsieur Leblanc meanwhile was taking off the brown overcoat he wore over his blue tail-coat. He laid it across the back of the chair and said:
‘Five francs is all I have left on me at the moment, Monsieur Fabantou. But I’ll take my daughter home and come back this evening. I think you said you need the money by this evening.’
Jondrette’s face was suddenly and wonderfully illumined. He replied eagerly:
‘Quite right, most worthy sir. I have to be at my landlord’s by eight o’clock’
‘Then I’ll come at six and I’ll bring you the sixty francs.’
‘My noble benefactor!’ cried Jondrette. And he added in an aside to his wife: ‘Are you looking at him?’
Taking his daughter’s arm, Monsieur Leblanc turned towards the door.
‘Until this evening, then.’
‘Six o’clock,’ said Jondrette.
‘Six o’clock precisely.’
But as they were in the act of leaving the elder Jondrette girl exclaimed:
‘Monsieur, you’re forgetting your overcoat.’
Jondrette darted a blistering look at her, accompanied by a massive shrug of the shoulders. Monsieur Leblanc said smiling:
‘I hadn’t forgotten it. I’m leaving it here.’
‘My protector!’ cried Jondrette. ‘My princely benefactor! I am moved to tears. Allow me to accompany you to your fiacre.’
‘In that case you had better put the coat on,’ said Monsieur Leblanc. ‘It is really very cold.’
Jondrette required no further urging. He promptly wrapped himself in the coat. The visitors left the room together, with Jondrette leading the way.
Marius had missed nothing of the foregoing scene, and yet in a sense he had seen nothing. His eyes had been intent upon the girl, his heart had as it were enfolded her from the moment she entered the room; and throughout the time that she was there he had known the state of ecstasy that dulls everyday perception, concentrating his whole being upon a single matter. It was not a girl that he saw, but a glow of light enclosed in a satin cape and a fur hood. If some heavenly body had appeared in the room he could have been no more amazed.
He had watched her as she undid the parcel of clothes and blankets, following her every movement and seeking to hear her words as she gently questioned the ailing mother and bent compassionately over the injured child. He already knew her face and figure, her eyes and forehead and grace of movement, but he could not be quite sure that he had heard her voice, although he thought that once in the Luxembourg he had heard her speak a few words. He would have given years of his life to be able to hear everything she said, to be able to carry away some of that music in his heart, but nearly all was lost in the flourishings and trumpetings of Jondrette. He could only devour her with his eyes, scarcely able to believe that so exquisite a creature could be present amid the unspeakable inmates of that foul place, like a humming-bird in a nest of toads.
His only thought when she had departed was to go after her, to follow on her footsteps until at least he had found out where she lived and ran no risk of losing her again after this miraculous rediscovery. Jumping down from the chest of drawers, he snatched up his hat; but then on the verge of opening his door, he hesitated. The corridor was a long one, the stairs steep and narrow, and Jondrette was an indefatigable talker. Monsieur Leblanc would probably not yet have got back to his fiacre. If he should look round and see Marius in that house he might well take fright again, and again find the means of eluding him. What should he do? Should he wait a little? If he did so he might be too late to see where the fiacre went. He hovered in perplexity, and at length, deciding that he must run the risk of being seen, he left his room.
The corridor was empty and so were the stairs. Hurrying down, he arrived on the boulevard just in time to see a fiacre turn the corner of the Rue du Petit-Banquier, heading back into Paris. He ran after it, and at the corner, saw it rapidly descending the Rue Mouffetard. It was already a long way ahead, and there seemed to be no way of overtaking it. Certainly he could not do so on foot, and in any case a person running madly after them would be bound to attract the notice of the occupants, and he would be recognized. But at this moment, by a rare and wonderful chance, he saw an empty hackney-cab going along the boulevard. Here was the solution of his problem, a means of following the fiacre swiftly and without the risk of being seen. Signalling to the driver, he called:
‘One hour!’
Marius was without a necktie; he was wearing his shabby working jacket, from which several buttons were missing, and his shirt was torn. The cab stopped, but the driver, looking him over, reached out a hand with a grin, rubbing his thumb against his index-finger.
‘Cash in advance,’ he said.
Marius then remembered that he had only sixteen sous on him.
‘How much?’
‘Forty sous.’
‘I’ll pay you when you’ve brought me back.’
The cabby’s only reply was to whistle derisively and whip up his horse.
Marius gazed miserably after him. For lack of twenty-four sous he was losing love and the hope of happiness, to be plunged again in darkness. After seeing a gleam of light he was again blind. He thought bitterly and with the utmost regret, be it said, of the five francs he had given that wretched girl. They might have saved him, rescued him from desolation, aimlessness, and solitude; instead of which, the bright thread of his destiny had again been broken and its darkest strands renewed. He went back to the tenement in despair.
He might have reflected that Monsieur Leblanc had promised to return that evening, and that this time he might be more successful in his efforts to track him down; but such was his state of dejection that the thought scarcely occurred to him.
As he was about to enter the house he saw Jondrette, enveloped in the ‘philanthropist’s’ overcoat, standing beside the long, blank wall of the Rue de la Barrière des Gobelins in conversation with one of those sinister individuals known as ‘gateway prowlers’; highly suspect figures, cryptic in their speech, who have a look of evil about them and who generally sleep by day, leading one to suppose that they do their work at night. The two men, standing motionless with their heads together under whirling snowflakes, formed a group which could not have failed to interest any guardian of the law, but which Marius scarcely noticed.
However, despite his melancholy preoccupations, the thought crossed his mind that the man Jondrette was talking to resembled a certain Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille, who had been pointed out to him by Courfeyrac and was regarded in the quarter as a dangerous night-bird. His name has already appeared in our pages. He was destined later, from having figured in a number of criminal trials, to acquire considerable celebrity, although at this time he was still no more than an inconspicuous rogue. Today he is a folk-hero of the underworld, talked of in whispers in the night-haunts of criminals and in the exercise-yard at the prison of La Force. Indeed in this prison, from which in 1843 thirty prisoners achieved the unheard-of feat of escaping in broad daylight, doing so by way of the latrine sewer, the name of PANCHAUD may still be read, audaciously carved on a wall above the latrines during one of his previous attempts to escape. In 1832 the police already had their eye on him, but he had not yet made strides in his career.
Marius went slowly up the tenement stairs; but as he walked along the corridor he saw that he was being followed by the elder Jondrette girl. The sight of her was now detestable to him, since she had had his five francs. There was no point in asking for them back; the fiacre had long since vanished from sight, and in any case she would not have returned them. Nor was there any point in asking her for the address of their visitors. Clearly she did not know this, since the letter signed Fabantou had been addressed simply to the gentleman at the Church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas. He went into his garret, pushing the door to behind him.
But the door did not shut, and turning, he saw that a hand was holding it ajar.
It was the Jondrette girl. ‘So it’s you again,’ said Marius almost harshly. ‘What do you want now?’
She did not reply but stood thoughtfully regarding him, seeming to have lost all her earlier assurance. She had not entered the room, but was still standing in the half-light of the corridor.
‘Can’t you answer?’ said Marius. ‘What do you want of me?’
She looked at him with mournful eyes, in which however a feint light gleamed.
‘Monsieur Marius,’ she said, ‘you seem upset. What is the matter?’
‘With me?’ asked Marius.
‘Yes.’
‘There’s nothing the matter with me.’
‘But there is.’
‘Please leave me alone.’ Marius tried again to shut the door, but she still held it open.
‘You’re making a mistake,’ she said. ‘You aren’t rich, but you were generous this morning. Be kind now. You gave me money for food, now tell me what your trouble is. I can see you’re unhappy about something, and I don’t want you to be unhappy. Is there nothing I can do for you? You have only to say. I’m not asking for secrets, you have no need to tell me everything, but perhaps I can be useful. I help my father, so perhaps I can help you too. When it comes to delivering letters, knocking at doors, finding out an address or following someone, well, that’s my job. You can tell me what you want, and perhaps there’s someone I can talk to. Sometimes you go and talk to people and you find things out and everything’s put right. You have only to say.’
He drew closer to her, a drowning man clutching at a straw.
‘Well, listen, my dear–’
She interrupted him, her eyes suddenly glowing.
‘Yes, talk to me nicely! That’s much better.’
‘Well, you brought that gentleman here, with his daughter. Do you know their address?’
‘No.’
‘Can you find out for me?’
The light had vanished from her face as swiftly as it had come.
‘Is that what you want?’
‘Yes.’
‘No.’
‘In other words,’ she said sharply, and with a hint of bitterness, ‘you don’t know her, and you want to?’
‘Can you do it?’ asked Marius.
‘Get you the address of the beautiful young lady?’
The note of sarcasm irritated Marius.
‘It doesn’t matter which,’ he said impatiently. ‘The address of father and daughter. Their address.’
She looked hard at him.
‘What will you give me?’
‘Anything you want.’
‘Anything?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I’ll get it.’
And abruptly she withdrew, closing the door behind her.
Marius dropped on to a chair and leaned forward with both elbows on his bed and his head in his hands, rendered almost giddy by the thought of all that had happened in so brief a time – the appearance of his divinity and her disappearance, and the undertaking this girl had just given him, which came as a ray of hope in his despair. But suddenly he started up.
The harsh voice of Jondrette was loudly raised next door, speaking words that instantly intrigued him.
‘I tell you I’m sure. I recognized him.’
To whom else could he be referring, if not to Monsieur Leblanc? Was the mystery surrounding father and daughter to be resolved in this rough, unpredictable fashion? Without another thought Marius leapt rather than climbed on to the chest of drawers and again stood peering through his spy-hole into the Jondrettes’ lair.
Nothing had changed except that the woman and the two girls had undone the parcel and were now wearing stockings and vests. Two new blankets lay on the beds.
Jondrette, who had evidently just come in, was still gasping with the chill of the outside air. The girls were seated on the floor by the fireplace, the older binding up the younger one’s hand. The woman was huddled on one of the beds staring in astonishment while her husband, with an extraordinary light in his eyes, strode up and down the room. She seemed dumbfounded by what he had been saying. She asked hesitantly:
‘Really? Are you sure?’
‘Of course I’m sure. It’s eight years, but I recognized him all right. I spotted him at once. Do you mean to say you didn’t?’
‘No.’
‘But I told you to have a good look at him – the general build of the man, and the face – he’s scarcely aged in eight years, there are people who never seem to look any older, I don’t know how they manage it – and then, the sound of his voice. He’s better dressed, that’s all. But, by God, I’ve got him now! … He broke off to address the two girls. ‘Clear out, you two … I’m surprised you didn’t see it at once.’
The girls got submissively to their feet, and the mother murmured:
‘With her cut hand?’
‘The fresh air will do her good,’ said Jondrette. ‘Off you go.’
He was clearly not a man to be argued with. The girls obeyed. But as they reached the door Jondrette took the elder by the arm and said with particular emphasis:
‘You’re to be back here at exactly five o’clock. Both of you. I’m going to need you.’
Marius was by now even more keenly interested.
Left alone with his wife, Jondrette resumed his pacing of the room. He paused for a moment to tuck the chemise into his trouser-waist, and then, turning abruptly and confronting her with folded arms, he said:
‘And I’ll tell you another thing. That girl …’
‘The girl,’ said his wife. ‘Well, what of her?’
There could no longer be any doubt about whom they were talking. Marius was now in a state of feverish expectation, his whole being concentrated in his ears. But Jondrette had bent over the woman and was talking in a whisper. Straightening up, he concluded:
‘That’s who she is.’
‘Her?’ said the woman.
‘Yes, her.’
No words can convey the tone of the woman’s voice, in which stupefaction, hatred, and outrage were mingled with a monstrous ferocity. Her husband’s whisper in her ear had had a startling effect on the gross creature lying on the bed: from being merely repulsive she had become hideous.
‘Impossible!’ she cried. ‘Our daughters barefoot and not a dress to their name, and that one in satin and fur and ankle boots – two hundred francs’ worth on her back and looking like a lady! You can’t be right. For one thing, that brat was ugly and this one’s not bad-looking, not bad at all. It can’t be the same.’
‘I tell you it is. You’ll see.’
His absolute assurance caused the Jondrette woman to stare up at the ceiling, her broad, raddled face distorted. At that moment she appeared to Marius more formidable than her husband – a sow with the look of a tigress.
‘That brat! And she comes here dressed like a lady and condescends to my daughters. I’d like to trample on her belly!’
Scrambling off the bed, she stood motionless for a moment, hair dishevelled, nostrils dilated, mouth half open while she thrust her clenched fists out behind her. Then she sank back on the bed. Her husband, paying no attention to this display, was again pacing the room. But after a brief silence he turned and faced her in his previous posture, with his arms folded.
‘Do you want me to tell you something else?’
‘What?’
He said in a low, tense voice:
‘This is going to make our fortune.’
The woman stared at him as though wondering if he had taken leave of his senses.
‘I’ve been a down-and-out long enough,’ he went on, ‘one of the starve-if-you-want-food-or-freeze-if-you-want-a-fire brigade. I’m tired of being one of the underdogs, a cur running with the pack. It doesn’t amuse me any more, it isn’t funny, I’m sick of God-almighty’s jokes. I want to be able to eat my fill and drink my fill, guzzle to my heart’s content and sleep it off, and never a stroke of work. I reckon it’s my turn, by God! Before I die I want to know what it feels like to live like a millionaire.’ He took another turn round the room and added: ‘Me and certain others.’
‘What does that mean?’ she asked.
He nodded and winked and said in the voice of a street-hawker crying his wares:
‘What does it mean? I’ll tell you. It means –’
‘Hush!’ said the woman. ‘Not so loud, if this is something other people aren’t supposed to hear.’
‘What other people? Him next door? I saw him go out a little while ago. Anyway, d’you think he’d be listening, Johnnie-head-in-air? I tell you, I saw him go out.’
He lowered his voice, but not enough to prevent Marius from hearing what he said. The fact that he missed nothing of what followed was in part due to the snowfall, which deadened the sound of vehicles passing along the boulevard.
‘Listen,’ Jondrette went on. ‘I’ve got him, the rich philanthropist. It’s in the bag. It’s all arranged. I’ve been talking to people. He’s coming at six, bringing the sixty francs. You heard the yarn I spun him, a year’s rent and the landlord, when it isn’t even quarter-day. He swallowed it, so he’ll be here at six, when the fine fellow next door goes off to dine and old mother Burgon’s out on a cleaning job. There won’t be a soul in the place. Him next door doesn’t ever get back before eleven. The girls will keep watch, you’ll help us, and he’ll cough up.’
‘But supposing he doesn’t?’
Jondrette made a gesture. ‘We’ll know what to do about it.’
For the first time Marius heard him laugh, a cold, soft laugh that made him shudder. Jondrette went to a cupboard and got out an old cap which he put on his head after brushing it with his sleeve.
‘I’ve got to go out again. There are some other men I’ve got to see, real good ‘uns. You’ll see. It’s a great game. I won’t be long. You stay and keep house.’ He stood in thought for a moment, with his hands in his trousers pockets, and then exclaimed: ‘You know, it’s a bit of luck he didn’t recognize me. If he had he wouldn’t be coming here again, not likely! It’s the beard that saved me – my flowing, romantic beard!’ He laughed once more and went over to the window. It was still snowing. ‘Filthy weather,’ he muttered, and drew the overcoat about him. ‘It’s too big for me, but no matter. It’s a devilish good thing the old rascal left it or I shouldn’t have been able to go out at all, and we’d have missed the chance. It’s wonderful the way things work out.’
Pulling the cap down over his eyes, he left the room; but a moment later the door opened again and his crafty, savage face appeared round it.
‘Something I meant to tell you. You’re to have a charcoal fire going.’
He tossed his wife the five-franc piece the visitor had given him.
‘A charcoal fire?’ she repeated.
‘That’s right.’
‘How much charcoal?’
‘A good two bushels.’
‘That’ll cost thirty sous. I’ll get something for supper with the rest.’
‘Not on your life!’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t want you spending any more of the money. There’s something I’ll have to buy.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Something … Is there an ironmonger’s round here?’
‘In the Rue Mouffetard.’
‘Ah, yes, I know the place.’
‘But how much is this thing going to cost?’
‘Two or three francs.’
‘That doesn’t leave much for supper.’
‘Then we must do without. We’ve something more important to think about.’
‘Very well, love.’
The door closed again, and this time Marius heard Jondrette’s footsteps go rapidly along the corridor and down the stairs.
The Saint-Médard clock struck one.
Despite his addiction to daydreaming Marius, as we know, was capable of firm and decided action. His solitary way of life, in developing his capacity for sympathy and compassion, had perhaps also made him more easy-going; but it had in no way diminished his capacity for outrage. He combined the benevolence of a Brahmin with the sternness of a judge: he might pity a toad, but he would set his foot on a viper. And what he had been peering into was a viper’s nest, a den of monsters.
‘These wretches must be dealt with,’ he told himself.
None of the riddles that perplexed him had been answered; if anything they had become more mystifying. He had learnt nothing more about the girl in the Luxembourg and the gentleman whom he called Monsieur Leblanc except that Jondrette knew them. Only one thing was clear from the conversation he had overheard, and this was that some kind of trap was being prepared, the nature of which he did not know but which represented a serious threat to both of them, the girl in all likelihood and her father for certain. He had to thwart Jondrette’s stratagems and destroy this spider’s web.
He continued for a moment to watch the Jondrette woman. She had fetched an old iron brazier from a corner of the room and was doing something to it. He got down from the chest of drawers, moving with the utmost caution. Amid his dread of what was being prepared, and the horror with which the Jondrettes inspired him, was a glow of happiness at the thought that he might be able to serve his beloved.
But how? He could not warn the prospective victims since he did not know where to find them. They had appeared for a brief moment and then vanished into the huge labyrinth of Paris. He might mount guard outside the house at six o’clock that evening and warn Monsieur Leblanc when he arrived. But Jondrette and his friends would be likely to see him; the street would be deserted at that hour and they would be too many for him, able to carry him off or drive him away, leaving Monsieur Leblanc none the wiser.
One o’clock had struck. Marius had five hours in which to act. There was only one thing to be done. Changing into his good suit, he wrapped a scarf round his neck, put on his hat and stole out of the house as quietly as though he were walking barefoot on grass.
He turned out of the boulevard into the Rue du Petit-Banquier. A section of the street was flanked by a low wall, so low that in places he could have stepped over it, beyond which lay a patch of wasteland. Marius was passing by this wall, walking slowly in his preoccupation, his footsteps deadened by the snow, when he heard the sound of voices somewhere near him. He looked round, but the street was empty. It was broad daylight, but he could distinctly hear voices. It occurred to him to look over the wall.
Two men were seated in the snow with their backs to the wall, talking in undertones. Both were unknown to him. One was a bearded man in a smock and the other a long-haired man in tattered garments. The bearded man wore a Greek cap, the other was bareheaded and snowflakes glistened in his hair. By leaning over the wall above them Marius could hear what they were saying.
The long-haired man nudged the other in the ribs and said:
‘With Patron-Minette it can’t fail.’
‘Think so?’ said the bearded man.
‘Sure as I’m sitting here. A carve-up of five hundred jimmys each, and the worst that can happen is a stretch of five or six years, ten at the outside.’
The other scratched his head under the Greek cap and said after reflection:
‘Well, that’s real money, no getting away from it.’
‘I tell you, it can’t miss,’ said the hairy man. ‘We’ll have old Mister Whatsit properly sewn up.’
Then they went on to talk about a melodrama they had seen the night before at the Gaîté theatre, and Marius continued on his way.
It seemed to him that the words he had overheard, spoken by two men so strangely seated in the snow with their backs against a wall, might well have some connection with Jondrette’s project. This, surely, must be the business they had been discussing.
Making for the Faubourg Saint-Marceau, he entered the first shop he came to and inquired the address of the nearest police-post. It was Number 14, Rue de Pontoise. He set out for it, and, foreseeing that he would have no dinner, stopped at a bakery on the way and bought a two-sou loaf of bread which he ate as he walked.
He reflected also that Providence must have its due. Had he not given the Jondrette girl his last five francs he would have followed Monsieur Leblanc’s fiacre and thus would have known nothing of the plot being hatched by Jondrette, to which the old gentleman would have fallen a victim and probably his daughter as well.
Arrived at Number 14, Rue de Pontoise, Marius went up to the first floor and asked to see the Superintendent of Police.
‘The superintendent isn’t here,’ said the desk-clerk. ‘There’s an inspector sitting in for him. Is it urgent?’
‘Yes,’ said Marius.
He was shown into the superintendent’s office. A tall man in a big greatcoat with a triple cape was standing on the other side of a metal grille with his back to a large stove and his coat-tails raised. He had a broad face, a thin, tight mouth, very bushy grey side-whiskers and keen eyes that seemed not merely to pierce but to explore. Indeed, he appeared little less ferocious and formidable than Jondrette; the hound can at times be as awkward a customer as the wolf.
‘What do you want?’ he asked with no attempt at civility.
‘Are you the Commissaire de Police?’
‘He’s away. I’m acting for him.’
‘This is a highly confidential matter.’
‘Well, tell me about it.’
‘And very urgent.’
“Then talk fast.’
His cool terseness was at once disconcerting and reassuring; he inspired both awe and confidence. Marius accordingly told his story in full, beginning with the statement that he was Marius Pontmercy, lawyer. A gentleman whom he knew only by sight was to be lured that evening into a trap. He had heard about the business because the man planning it occupied the room next to his own in the house where he lived. The villain in question was a man named Jondrette, but he would have accomplices, probably gateway prowlers, among them a certain Panchaud, also known as Printanier and as Bigrenaille. Jondrette’s wife and two daughters were also involved. He, Marius, had no means of warning the victim because he did not even know his name. The trap was to be sprung at six o’clock that evening in a house in the most deserted part of the Boulevard de l’Hôpital, No. 50–52.
The mention of this number caused the inspector to look up sharply.
‘Would it be the room at the end of the corridor?’
‘Yes,’ said Marius in surprise. ‘Do you know the house?’
The inspector was silent for a moment, staring thoughtfully at the floor. ‘It seems I do,’ he said. And he went on, mumbling in his cravat and talking less to Marius than to himself. ‘Looks like Patron-Minette’s mixed up in it.’
The words struck Marius.
‘Patron-Minette! I heard that name only a little while ago.’
He went on to repeat the conversation he had overheard in the Rue du Petit-Banquier. The inspector grunted.
‘The hairy one was probably Brujon, and the one with the beard would be Demi-Liard, also known as Deux-Milliards. As for the injured party, I fancy … Damn, I’ve singed my coat. They always make these infernal stoves too hot … Number 50–52 – used to belong to Gorbeau.’ He looked up at Marius. ‘You only saw those two, the man with a beard and the hairy one?’
‘And Panchaud, in the street, talking to Jondrette.’
‘You haven’t seen anything of a dressed-up youth, a sort of backstreet fop?’
‘No.’
‘Or a great hulk of a man who looks like the elephant in the Jardin des Plantes?’
‘No.’
‘Or a little crafty weasel of a man, who looks as though he might be an ex-convict?’
‘No.’
‘No, well – as for the fourth, it’s not surprising you haven’t seen him. Nobody ever does, not even his associates.’
‘But who are all these people?’ asked Marius.
‘Besides,’ said the inspector, ignoring the question, ‘they don’t go about in daylight.’
He was silent again, and then muttered:
‘I know the place all right, number 50–52. Nowhere in it to hide, without those beauties spotting us, and then they’d call the show off. They’re shy, you see; don’t like an audience. We can’t have that. I want to hear ’em sing and make ’em dance.’
Having concluded this monologue he looked hard at Marius.
‘Would you be scared?’
‘What of?’
‘These men.’
‘No more than you,’ said Marius coolly. He was beginning to notice that this policeman never addressed him as sir.
The inspector continued to study him, and then said with a sort of sententious gravity:
‘You talk like a brave man and an honest one. Courage does not fear crime, and honesty has no need to fear authority.’
Marius cut him short.
‘All right. But what are you proposing?’
‘The people living in that house have door-keys to let them in at night. I take it you have one?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you got it with you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then let me have it.’
Marius got out the key and handed it to him, saying as he did so:
‘If you’ll take my advice you won’t go alone.’
The inspector bestowed on him the sort of glance Voltaire might have bestowed on a provincial academic who ventured to lecture him on poetry. Plunging with a single movement his two enormous hands into the capacious pockets of his greatcoat, he brought out two very small pistols of the kind known as coups de poing, or, ‘punches’.
‘Take these,’ he said briskly. ‘They’re both loaded, two balls in each. Go back home and hide in your room so that they think you’re out. Keep watch through that hole you spoke of. When they arrive, let them start their business, and when you think it’s gone far enough fire a shot. Then I’ll take charge. A single shot into the ceiling or anywhere. But not too soon, understand. They’ve got to start, there’s got to be evidence. You’re a lawyer. You know what I mean.’
Marius took the pistols and put them in a side-pocket of his jacket.
“They make a bulge like that, they show,’ the inspector said. ‘Better put them in your waist band.’
Marius did as he was told.
‘And now there’s no time to be lost. What time is it? Half past two. The party’s at seven, you said?’
‘Six,’ said Marius.
‘Well, that still gives me time, but only just. Don’t forget what I told you. One pistol-shot.’
‘I’ll do it,’ said Marius and turned to leave the room.
‘One other thing,’ the inspector said. ‘If you should need me before then you’d better come here or send someone. The name’s Javert.’
Shortly after this, at about three o’clock, Courfeyrac happened to walk along the Rue Mouffetard in company with Bossuet. The snow was falling more heavily than ever, and Bossuet was saying:
‘To see all these snowflakes you’d think we were afflicted with a plague of white butterflies.’ He broke off at the sight of a figure striding in a rather odd manner up the street in the direction of the barrier. ‘Why, there’s Marius!’
‘So I see,’ said Courfeyrac. ‘Better not speak to him.’
‘Why not?’
‘Can’t you see he’s busy?’
‘But what is he doing?’
‘From the look of him, he’s following someone.’
‘It does look like that,’ said Bossuet. ‘But who?’
‘Probably some poppet he’s taken a fancy to.’
‘I don’t see any poppets anywhere,’ said Bossuet. ‘There isn’t a wench in sight.’
Courfeyrac was staring.
‘He’s following a man!’ he exclaimed.
It was a man in a cap, about twenty paces ahead of Marius. Although his back was turned to them they had a glimpse of a grey beard. The man was wearing a new overcoat very much too large for him and a pair of extremely ragged trousers spattered with mud.
Bossuet laughed. ‘Who the devil would he be?’
‘He must be a poet,’ said Courfeyrac. ‘Only a poet would go about in a tramp’s trousers and a coat fit for a lord.’
‘Let’s follow the two of them and see where they go.’
‘My dear Bossuet, Eagle of Words,’ said Courfeyrac, ‘what a great fathead you are! To follow a man who’s following a man!’
They turned and went the other way.
Marius had seen Jondrette in the Rue Mouffetard and was following to see what he was up to. Jondrette hurried on unsuspecting. He turned out of the Rue Mouffetard, and Marius saw him go into one of the most ramshackle hovels in the Rue Gracieuse. He was there for about a quarter of an hour and then, returning to the Rue Mouffetard, he visited the ironmongery which at that time stood on the corner of the Rue Pierre-Lombard. A few minutes later he came out holding a large cold-chisel with a wooden handle which he proceeded to hide under his new coat. He turned left into the Rue du Petit-Gentilly and made rapidly for the Rue du Petit-Banquier. Marius did not follow him along this street, which was deserted as usual, but kept cautious watch from the corner. In this he was wise, because Jondrette, when he came to the low wall where Marius had heard the two men talking, looked round to make sure he was unobserved and then scrambled over the wall and disappeared.
The patch of wasteland beyond this wall adjoined the back yard of a former dealer in hired conveyances, a man of unsavoury reputation who had been sold up but still kept a few old vehicles in his shed.
Marius decided that he had better take advantage of Jondrette’s absence to get back to the tenement. It was growing late, and Ma’am Bougon, when she went off to her work as a cleaning-woman, was in the habit of locking the front door behind her. Since he had given the inspector his key, he must be in before this happened.
Darkness was rapidly falling, and only a single gleam of light in the black immensity of the heavens reflected the rays of the sun. It was the moon rising red beyond the low cupola of the Salpêtrière.
Marius made all speed back to No. 50–52, and found the door still open. He climbed the stairs on tip-toe and, keeping close to the wall, crept along the corridor to his room. This corridor, it will be remembered, was flanked on either side by attics, all of them at that moment empty and to let. Ma’am Bougon was in the habit of leaving their doors open. As he passed one of the supposedly empty cells Marius had an impression of four motionless men’s heads silhouetted for an instant against the faint light filtering through the small window. He made no attempt to see more, not wishing to be seen himself, and succeeded in reaching his room without being either seen or heard. And just in time. A moment later he heard Ma’am Bougon depart and the key turn in the lock of the front door.
Marius sat down on his bed. The time was about half past five – only half an hour to go. He could hear the blood pounding in his veins like the ticking of a clock in darkness. He thought of the forces mustering in the shadows, the march of crime on the one side and of justice on the other. He was not afraid, but he could not think without a tremor of what was so soon to happen. As with all persons plunged suddenly in an unforeseen adventure, the day’s events had for him a dreamlike quality, and he needed to finger the cold metal of the pistols in his waistband to assure himself that he was not in the grip of a nightmare.
It had stopped snowing. The moon, growing steadily brighter, had now risen above the mist, and its rays, mingled with the white reflection of the fallen snow, flooded his room with a cavernous light. A light was burning in the Jondrettes’ lair. Marius could see through the hole in the partition a ruddy glow which looked to him like a blood-red eye. Certainly it did not look like the light of a candle. Otherwise nothing stirred in that room. No one moved or spoke or even breathed. It was locked in an icy silence so profound that, except for the light, one might have thought oneself beside a tomb.
Marius quietly took off his boots and thrust them under his bed. Several minutes passed. Then he heard the creaking of the street door. Heavy footsteps ascended the stairs and passed rapidly along the corridor, and the latch of the door next to his was noisily lifted. Jondrette had returned.
Voices were instantly raised. It seemed that they were all there but had kept quiet in the absence of the master, like wolf-cubs in the absence of the wolf.
‘Here I am,’ Jondrette said.
‘Good evening, daddykins!’ giggled the two girls.
‘Well?’ said his wife.
‘Everything’s fine,’ said Jondrette, ‘but my feet are frozen. I see you’ve got dressed. Good. You’ve got to look respectable.’
‘I’m all ready to go out.’
‘You won’t forget what I told you? You’ll do it right?’
‘Don’t worry.’
‘You see –’ began Jondrette, but he did not finish the sentence. Marius heard him drop some heavy object on the table, probably the chisel he had bought. ‘Hello! Have you had something to eat?’
‘Yes,’ said the woman. ‘I had three big potatoes and some salt. Seeing we had a fire, I baked them.’
‘Good,’ said Jondrette. ‘Tomorrow I’ll take you all out to dinner – roast duck and everything that goes with it. You’ll dine like the king himself. Everything’s fine.’ He added in a lower voice, ‘The trap’s baited and the cats are waiting.’ He then said, lower still: ‘Put that in the fire.’
Marius heard the rasping sound of tongs or some other metal instrument being thrust into the charcoal.
‘Did you grease the door-hinges so that they don’t squeak?’ asked Jondrette.
‘Yes,’ said the woman.
‘What’s the time?’
‘Getting on for six. The half hour has struck at Saint-Médard.’
‘Time for the girls to go on watch,’ said Jondrette. ‘Listen to me, you two.’ A sound of whispering followed. Then he raised his voice again. ‘Has Ma’am Bougon gone?’
‘Yes,’ said the woman.
‘And you’re sure he’s not in next door?’
‘He hasn’t been in all day, and you know this is his dinnertime.’
‘You’re positive?’
‘Quite.’
‘All the same,’ said Jondrette, ‘no harm in having a look. You, girl – take the candle.’
Marius went down on hands and knees and slid silently under the bed. He had scarcely done so when light showed through the cracks in his door.
‘He’s out,’ a voice called, and he recognized it as that of the older girl.
‘Have you looked?’ Jondrette asked.
‘No, but his key’s in the door, and that means he’s out.’
‘Go in all the same.’
The door opened and the girl entered carrying a candle. She looked much as she had done that morning, but even more garish in that light. She moved towards the bed, and Marius had a moment of acute alarm; but there was a mirror suspended on the wall near the bed, and this was what she was making for. She stood on tip-toe studying herself. A sudden clatter of metal against metal came from the next room.
She stood smoothing her hair with one hand while she smiled at herself in the glass and sang in her croaking voice:
Our love was all too swiftly over,
Happiness so soon is past.
For one short week to have a lover!
But true love should forever last,
For ever, ever, ever last!
Marius lay trembling under the bed, thinking that she must surely hear the sound of his breathing.
She went over to the window and looked out, talking aloud to herself in the half-crazed way that was characteristic of her.
‘How ugly Paris looks in a white shirt!’
She came back to the mirror and posed in front of it, examining herself front and three-quarter face. Her father’s voice called:
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m looking under the bed and the furniture,’ she replied, still arranging her hair. ‘There is no one here.’
‘Then come back, for God’s sake! Don’t waste any more time.’
‘All right, all right, I’m coming. There’s never time for anything in this hole.’
She sang:
You leave me to take the road to glory,
But my heart will follow you all the way.
With a final glance at the mirror she went out, closing the door behind her. A moment later Marius heard the bare feet of the two girls going along the corridor while their father shouted after them:
‘Now remember – one by the barrier and the other at the corner of the Rue du Petit-Banquier. Don’t take your eyes off the door of the house, and if you see anything, get back here at the double. You’ve got a key.’
‘A fine job!’ the older girl called back. ‘Keeping look-out barefoot in the snow.’
‘Tomorrow you shall have fur-lined boots,’ was the reply.
They went on down the stairs, and the sound of the front door closing indicated that they had gone out.
There was now no one left in the house except Marius and the Jondrette couple; and, presumably, the mysterious beings of whom he had caught a glimpse in the darkness of the unoccupied room.
Marius decided that it was time for him to return to his post of observation, and within an instant, moving with the suppleness of youth, he was back on the chest of drawers with his eye to the peep-hole.
The aspect of the Jondrette dwelling was singularly changed. He could now account for the strange light he had seen. A candle was burning in a tarnished candlestick, but this was not its source; the garret was flooded with the glare of a fair-sized brazier standing in the hearth and filled with glowing charcoal. The brazier itself was red hot, and the blue name dancing on top of the charcoal helped him to discern the outline of the chisel bought by Jondrette in the Rue Pierre-Lombard, which had been thrust into it. In a corner by the door, as though put there for a specific purpose, were two piles of objects, one a heap of what looked like scrap-iron and the other a pile of rope. To an observer not knowing what was going on all this would have suggested two ideas, one very sinister and the other very simple. The den, thus illumined, looked more like a smithy than a gateway to the inferno; but Jondrette by the same light looked more like a demon than a blacksmith.
The heat of the brazier was so great that the candle, which stood on the table, was melting on the side nearest it. An antiquated copper dark-lantern, worthy of a Diogenes turned housebreaker, stood on the mantelshelf. The brazier was standing amid the cooling ashes of the hearth so that its smoke went up the chimney and did not drift into the room. The moon shining through the four small panes of the window mingled its whiteness with the ruddy glow that filled the garret, and to the poetic fancy of Marius, a dreamer even in this moment of action, it was like a thought of Heaven mingling with the ugly fantasies of earth. A faint draught from the broken window helped to dispel the fumes of burning charcoal.
The Jondrettes’ garret, as the reader may recall from what has been said about the Gorbeau tenement, was admirably suited to acts of darkness and violence, a perfect setting for crime. It was the end room of the most isolated house in the least frequented boulevard in Paris. If ambushes had never existed, it was here that they might have been invented. The whole depth of the house and a row of unoccupied rooms separated this one from the boulevard, and its only window looked on to a wide expanse of open country broken by walls and fences.
Jondrette had lit his pipe and sat smoking on the seatless chair. His wife was talking to him in a low voice. If Marius had been Courfeyrac, that is to say, one of those young men who find humour in all things, the sight of her would have made him laugh. She was wearing a black hat with feathers not unlike those worn by the herald-at-arms at the coronation of Charles X, a vast tartan shawl, a woollen skirt and the men’s shoes which her daughter had so despised earlier in the day. This was the get-up that had won her husband’s approval, causing her to look ‘respectable’. He himself was still wearing the overcoat bestowed on him by Monsieur Leblanc, and the contrast between this and his cotton trousers still presented the incongruity which Courfeyrac held to be the hall-mark of a poet. Suddenly he raised his voice:
‘I’ve just thought of something. He’ll be bound to come in a fiacre in this weather. Light the lantern and go downstairs with it and wait at the front door. Open the door directly you hear the cab draw up. Light him up the stairs, then run down again, pay off the cab, and send it away.’
‘What about the money?’
Jondrette felt in his pocket and handed her a five-franc piece.
‘Where does this come from?’ she exclaimed.
‘From him next door, this morning,’ said Jondrette with dignity. Another thought struck him. ‘You know something? We need two chairs.’
‘What for?’
‘To sit on.’
A shiver ran down Marius’s spine as the woman said calmly:
‘I’ll get them from next door.’
She rose at once and left the room.
‘Take the candle,’ shouted Jondrette.
‘It would only hamper me. I shall have two chairs to carry. There’s moonlight enough.’
It was a physical impossibility for Marius to get down from the chest and under the bed in time. A hand groped heavily at his door, feeling for the handle, and then the door opened. Marius stayed where he was, rigid with dismay.
The woman entered. The dormer window allowed a narrow spread of moonlight to enter the room, framed by two wider spheres of darkness, one of which entirely covered the wall against which Marius was standing so that for practical purposes he was invisible. She looked about her without seeing him, picked up the two chairs, the only ones he possessed, and went out with them, leaving the door to swing noisily to behind her.
‘Here they are,’ she said, re-entering their own room.
‘And here’s the lantern,’ said her husband. ‘Now cut along downstairs.’
She hurried out again, leaving the man alone.
Jondrette placed the chairs on either side of the table, twisted the chisel in the burning charcoal and moved an old screen in front of the hearth to hide the brazier. Then he bent over the pile of rope as though inspecting it. Marius now realized that what he had supposed to be nothing but rope was in fact a well-made rope ladder with wooden rungs and two iron hooks to hang it by. Neither the ladder nor the several large implements, like bludgeons, among the scrap-iron in the other heap, had been in the room that morning. Jondrette must have brought them in during the afternoon, while Marius was out.
‘They’re metal-worker’s tools,’ thought Marius. Had he been better versed in these matters he would have recognized, among what he supposed to be ordinary workshop tools, certain more sinister implements used for the forcing of doors and locks, and others capable of cutting and splitting, burglars’ chisels and jemmies.
The fireplace, and the table with the chairs on either side, were exactly opposite Marius. Now that the brazier was hidden the room was lighted only by the candle. The smallest objects, on the table or the mantelshelf, cast huge shadows, that of the broken water-jug covering half the wall behind it. The room was filled with a black and ominous calm, the forerunner of dreadful events.
Jondrette had let his pipe go out, in itself a sign of tension, and was again seated. The light of the candle threw into relief the sharp, bestial lines and hollows of his face. His eyebrows rose and fell and his right hand nervously opened and closed as though he were answering the last admonition of some counsellor within himself. In the course of this silent colloquy he abruptly pulled open the table drawer, got out a long table-knife and tested its edge with his finger. Then he put it back again and closed the drawer.
Marius got the pistol out of his right-hand fob pocket and cocked it, making a sharp click as he did so. Jondrette started and half rose from his chair.
‘Who’s there?’ he called.
Marius held his breath, and after a moment Jondrette laughed, saying:
‘I’m getting jumpy. Nothing but a board creaking.’
Marius kept the pistol in his hand.
Of a sudden a distant, melancholy sound caused the windows to vibrate slightly. Six o’clock was striking at the church of Saint-Médard.
Jondrette noted each stroke with a nod of his head, and when the sixth had sounded he snuffed out the candle with his fingers. Then he began to pace the room, stood listening at the door, paced and listened again. ‘So long as he comes!’ he muttered, and returned to his chair. Scarcely had he seated himself than the door opened.
His wife stood in the corridor, her hideous grimace of welcome lighted from below by one of the apertures in the dark-lantern.
‘Please to come in, Monsieur,’ she said.
‘My noble benefactor, enter!’ cried Jondrette, hastily rising.
Monsieur Leblanc appeared. His serene bearing lent him a singular dignity. He placed four louis on the table.
‘That is for your rent and urgent requirements, Monsieur Fabantou,’ he said. ‘We have to consider what else is needed.’
‘May God reward you, most generous sir,’ said Jondrette; and in a swift aside to his wife: ‘Get rid of the cab.’
She vanished, and had reappeared by the time Jondrette with many bows and fulsome expressions of gratitude had seated Monsieur Leblanc on one of the chairs. She gave him a nod. The snow was so thick on the ground that the fiacre had made no sound in arriving or departing. Jondrette now took the chair facing Monsieur Leblanc.
If he is to gain a true impression of the scene that follows the reader must take into account the ice-cold night, the snow-covered spaces around the Salpêtrière shining whitely under the moon as though enveloped in a shroud, the street-lamps here and there relieving with a ruddy glow the desolate boulevards with their long lines of black elms, no moving figure to be seen within perhaps half a mile, and the Gorbeau tenement in its state of total silence, squalor, and darkness; and within the tenement, its shadows and its empty places, the large irregular garret lighted by a single candle with two men seated at the table, one serene of aspect and the other leering and dreadful, the woman hovering like a she-wolf in the background, and Marius, standing unseen on the other side of the partition with his eye to the aperture, intently following every word and every gesture with a pistol in his hand.
Marius’s feeling was one of abhorrence but not of fear. Tightening his grip on the pistol-butt, he was reassured. ‘I can stop the brute whenever I please,’ he thought. The police were hidden somewhere close at hand, waiting for the summons to intervene. Moreover he was hopeful that this violent encounter between Monsieur Leblanc and Jondrette would throw some light on the things that he so longed to know.
Monsieur Leblanc’s first act when he was seated was to look round at the two empty beds. ‘How is the hurt child?’ he asked.
‘Not well,’ said Jondrette with a smile of mournful gratitude. ‘She’s in great pain. Her sister has taken her to the hospital to have the wound dressed. But you will be seeing them, my dear sir. They will be back soon.’
‘Madame Fabantou seems to have recovered,’ said Monsieur Leblanc, glancing at the weird attire of the Jondrette woman, who was standing between him and the door as though guarding the exit, in a posture of menace almost as if she was offering battle.
‘She’s desperately ill,’ said Jondrette. ‘But what is one to do? She has so much courage, you see. She’s more than a woman – she’s an ox.’
The elegant compliment drew a simper from the lady and she exclaimed coyly:
‘You always flatter me, Monsieur Jondrette.’
‘Jondrette?’ said Monsieur Leblanc. ‘I thought your name was Fabantou?’
‘It’s either,’ said Jondrette promptly. ‘Jondrette is my stage name.’
He gave his wife a look which Leblanc failed to notice and launched into a loud and unctuous discourse.
‘We have always lived so happily together, my dear wife and I. Without that, what would become of us? We are so unfortunate, honoured sir. We have the will to work, we have the heart, but the work is not to be had. I do not know how the Government arranges these things, but I give you my word, my dear sir – and I am not a Jacobin or one of your half-baked democrats, although I wish them no harm – I give you my word that if I were a minister things would be very different. I will give you an example. I wanted my daughters to learn the packing trade. You will say, “What? A trade?” Yes, sir, a trade, a humble trade to earn an honest living. A sad decline, my noble benefactor. A degradation, considering what we once were. But alas, nothing remains to us of our former prosperity. Or rather, only one thing, a painting which I greatly value but which I shall have to part with if we are to live. For we have to live, do we not? We have to go on living.’
While Jondrette was thus holding forth with a seeming incoherence strangely at odds with his cool, calculating expression, Marius, looking beyond him, saw someone who had not been there before. A man had stolen into the room, moving so cautiously that the door-hinges had made no sound. He was wearing no shirt but a tattered waistcoat that gaped at every seam, loose corduroy trousers and ropesoled slippers; his bare arms were tattooed and his face was blackened. He was now seated with folded arms on the nearest bed, partly hidden behind the tall form of the Jondrette woman.
The kind of magnetic instinct that alerts our senses caused Monsieur Leblanc to notice him at almost the same moment as Marius, and he gave a start which Jondrette did not fail to perceive.
‘You’re looking at your overcoat,’ he cried, drawing its folds more closely about him. ‘The one you were so kind as to leave with me. It’s a splendid fit, isn’t it?’
‘Who is that man?’ asked Monsieur Leblanc.
‘Him?’ said Jondrette. ‘He’s a neighbour. Pay no attention to him.’
The neighbour had certainly an odd appearance. But chemical factories abound in the Faubourg Saint-Marceau, and it is not uncommon for factory-workers to have grimy faces. In any event, Monsieur Leblanc’s attitude was still one of easy and untroubled confidence.
‘I beg your pardon,’ he said. ‘What were you saying, Monsieur Fabantou?’
‘I was telling you, my most noble patron,’ said Jondrette, leaning forward with his elbows on the table and gazing tenderly at Monsieur Leblanc with eyes not unlike those of a boa-constrictor, ‘that I have a picture for sale.’
A slight sound came from the door. A second man had entered and seated himself on the bed. Like the first he was bare-armed, and his face, too, was blackened with ink or soot. Although he had literally slid into the room, he had not been able to prevent Monsieur Leblanc from hearing him.
‘Don’t worry about them,’ Jondrette said. ‘They’re just people living in the house. I was saying that I have a valuable picture. Perhaps you will allow me to show it to you.’
He rose and picking up the panel leaning against the wall turned it round and left it leaning there. The light of the candle was sufficient to show that it was indeed some sort of picture. Marius could make out none of the details because Jondrette was standing in the way. He had a brief glimpse of an ill-drawn figure crudely embellished with the garish colours of a fairground placard.
‘What on earth is it?’ asked Monsieur Leblanc.
‘It is a masterpiece, my dear sir,’ cried Jondrette. ‘A picture of great price, and one which I cherish as I do my own daughters. It conjures up memories. But as I have said – and I cannot gainsay it – I have been reduced to such straits that I am forced to part with it!’
Perhaps by chance, or because he was growing uneasy, Monsieur Leblanc, while examining the picture, also glanced round. There were now four strangers, present, three seated on the bed and one standing by the door, all bare-armed, motionless and with blackened faces. One of the three on the bed was half-lying with his back against the wall and his eyes closed, as though he were asleep. He was old, his white hair in horrid contrast to his daubed face. The other two seemed to be young men, one bearded and the other longhaired. None wore boots. Those not in slippers were barefoot.
Catching the direction of Monsieur Leblanc’s glance, Jondrette said:
‘They’re friends of mine, all neighbours. They’re furnacemen; they have dirty faces because they do dirty work. Don’t worry about them, noble benefactor, but buy my picture. Have pity on my distress. I’ll let you have it cheap. What do you consider it is worth?’
Monsieur Leblanc was looking closely at him, like a man now on his guard.
‘It’s an old inn-sign,’ he said. ‘It’s worth about three francs.’
Jondrette said softly:
‘Have you your wallet on you? I will accept a thousand crowns.’
Monsieur Leblanc rose, and standing with his back to the wall looked rapidly round the room. Jondrette was on his left, at the end nearest the window, and the woman and the four men were on his right near the door. The men did not stir, and seemed not even to see him. Jondrette continued to talk in a wailing voice, his gaze so distraught and his accents so pitiable that Monsieur Leblanc might have been pardoned for thinking that he had nothing more to deal with than a man driven out of his wits by misfortune.
‘If you do not buy my picture, noble benefactor, then I shall have no recourse but to throw myself into the river. I wanted my daughters to learn the packing-trade, and rough packaging at that, foodstuffs and suchlike. But for that you need a solid edged table, with a flange, so that jars don’t fell off it; you need all kinds of implements, a stove for heating glue to different temperatures according to the kind of material you’re using, whether it’s wood or metal or cardboard, cutters and shapers and pincers and stamps and lord knows what besides. And what do you earn by it? Four sous a day for four hours’ work! And everything to be kept spotlessly clean. I ask you! Four sous a day. How is anyone to live on that?’
Jondrette was not looking at Monsieur Leblanc while he spoke. Monsieur Leblanc’s eyes were fixed intently upon him, but Jondrette was watching the door. Marius, for his part, was gazing breathlessly from one to the other. Monsieur Leblanc seemed to be asking himself, ‘Is the man mad?’ Jondrette was babbling. He repeated several times, in varying accents of self-pity, ‘Nothing left but to throw myself in the river… The other day I went down the steps by the Pont d’Austerlitz …’
But suddenly the dull eyes flamed; the little man drew himself up and became terrifying. Taking a step towards Monsieur Leblanc, he shouted:
‘But never mind all that! Don’t you know me?’
The door of the garret was suddenly flung wide to admit three men in dark smocks wearing black paper masks. The first was thin and carried a long, iron-studded cudgel. The second, a species of colossus, was carrying a butcher’s pole-axe. The third, a square-shouldered man, less lean than the first but less massive than the second, grasped a huge key stolen from some prison-door.
It seemed that this was what Jondrette had been awaiting. There was a rapid exchange of dialogue between him and the man with the cudgel.
‘Is everything ready?’ Jondrette asked.
‘Yes,’ the thin man replied.
‘But where’s Montparnasse?’
‘The pretty boy stopped to chat to your daughter.’
‘Which one?’
‘The older.’
‘The fiacre’s ready?’
‘Yes.’
‘Two good horses?’
‘First-rate.’
‘And it’s waiting where I said?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good,’ said Jondrette.
Monsieur Leblanc had grown pale. He was looking about him in the manner of a man who now knows what he has to contend with, his head slowly turning as, in watchful astonishment but with no sign of fear, he considered the group of men confronting him. He was using the table as an improvised barricade. The man who a few moments before had looked like nothing but an amiable elderly gentleman had suddenly become a sort of athlete, his powerful hand grasping the back of his chair with a gesture that was at once formidable and surprising. His resolute courage in the face of danger was that of a nature to whom fortitude came as readily as goodness, as easily and as simply. The father of a beloved woman can never be wholly remote from us. Marius was filled with pride.
The three bare-armed ruffians whom Jondrette had described as furnace-men had meanwhile gone to the heap of scrap-iron. One had taken up a pair of shears, the second a pair of tongs, and the third a hammer; and now, without speaking a word, they stationed themselves in front of the door. The old man was still reclining on the bed, but with his eyes open. The Jondrette woman was seated beside him.
It seemed to Marius that the time was very near when he must give the alarm, and he raised his right hand with the pistol, pointing it upwards in the general direction of the corridor. Jondrette, having concluded his colloquy with the man with the cudgel, turned back to Monsieur Leblanc and repeated his question, this time accompanying the words with a low, sinister laugh.
‘Don’t you recognize me?’
Monsieur Leblanc looked steadily at him.
‘No.’
Jondrette drew close to the table. Thrusting his fierce, angular countenance as near as he could bring it to the impassive face of Monsieur Leblanc, and crouching like a wild beast about to spring, he cried:
‘My name isn’t Fabantou or Jondrette either. My name is Thénardier! I’m the innkeeper from Montfermeil. Thénardier, d’you hear? Now do you recognize me?’
A slight quiver passed over Monsieur Leblanc’s face, but he answered calmly and without raising his voice:
‘No more than before.’
Marius did not hear this reply. His face at that moment, could anyone have observed him in the darkness, had grown haggard with stupefaction and dismay. At the sound of Thénardier’s name he had trembled so violently as to have to lean against the partition for support, feeling a chill as though a sword-blade had been driven into his heart. His right arm, raised to fire the warning shot, sank slowly to his side, and when the name was repeated his nerveless fingers came near to letting it fall to the floor. Jondrette in disclosing his identity had not shaken Monsieur Leblanc, but he had shattered Marius. Monsieur Leblanc might not know the name, but Marius knew it. We must remember what it meant to him. His father’s solemn injunction was written on his heart – ‘A man called Thénardier saved my life. If my son should meet him he will do him every service in his power.’ It had become for him an article of faith, a name linked with that of his father in his prayers. And now, here he was, Thénardier, the innkeeper of Montfermeil, his father’s rescuer whom Marius had so long and vainly sought – a bandit, a monster in the act of committing an abominable crime, the nature of which was still not fully clear but which looked like murder. And the murder of whom, in God’s name! … Could Fate have played any more scurvy trick than this? For four years Marius had been obsessed with the resolve to acquit the debt laid upon him by his father, to serve this man if he could find him; and now it seemed that instead he would be sending him to the gallows, to public execution on the Place Saint-Jacques, the man who had saved his father at the risk of his life! Yet how could he witness this infamy and not prevent it?– condemn the victim and spare the assassin? Could any debt be valid that was owed to such a man? … With his whole scheme of things collapsed about him, Marius stood and trembled. Everything depended on him; he held these people in the hollow of his hand. If he fired the warning shot Monsieur Leblanc would be saved and Thénardier destroyed; otherwise Monsieur Leblanc would be sacrificed and Thénardier would perhaps escape. One or the other must be on Marius’s conscience. Was he to honour his father’s last wishes, his own filial duty and solemn pledge, or permit the accomplishment of a crime? Two voices seemed to ring in his ears, that of the girl pleading for her father and that of the colonel commending Thénardier to his care. His senses were reeling and he felt his knees grow weak. Nor was there any time for thought, so furiously was the drama unfolding under his gaze. It was as though a whirlwind of which he had thought himself the master were carrying him away. He was on the point of fainting.
Meanwhile Thénardier, whom henceforth – we shall call by no other name, was stalking up and down in a sort of frenzied triumph. Seizing the candlestick he banged it down on the mantelshelf with a gesture so violent that the candle was nearly extinguished and tallow splashed on the wall. Then, turning to Monsieur Leblanc, he spat at him.
‘Your goose is cooked! You’re spitted and roasted, my fine bird!’
He resumed his pacing, fulminating as he did so.
‘So I’ve caught up with you at last, my noble philanthropist, my wealthy buyer of dolls! But you don’t know me, eh? It wasn’t you who came to my tavern in Montfermeil on Christmas Eve eight years ago and took away Fantine’s brat, the Lark, so called? You weren’t wearing a yellow coat, were you? You didn’t come in with a parcel of clothes under your arm, just like you did this morning? Wife, are you listening? It seems he has a passion for calling on people with a bundle of stockings. He’s a man of charity, you see. Perhaps you keep a clothes store, my generous millionaire, and give away your surplus stock to the poor? Charlatan! And so you don’t know me! But I know you, all right. I recognized you the moment you shoved your face inside this door. Well, now you’re going to learn that it isn’t all that rosy, walking into a man’s house which happens to be an inn, fooling him by being dressed like a tramp, taking away his domestic help and afterwards threatening him in the woods – you can’t make it right by just bringing a few old hospital blankets and leaving an overcoat that doesn’t fit! Scoundrel! Kidnapper!’
He paused, seeming to commune with himself as though the torrent of his fury had fallen into a sudden trough; and then, as though summing up the thoughts that were in his mind, he thumped with his fist on the table and cried:
‘As though butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth!’
He turned again to Monsieur Leblanc.
‘You got the better of me once! You’re the cause of all my troubles. For fifteen hundred francs you got hold of a girl who was mine and who certainly had rich connections; she’d brought me in money already, and I reckoned to live on her for the rest of my life. She might have made good my losses in that filthy dram-shop where they came to drink themselves senseless and where like the sot I was, I swallowed my own substance. By God, I wish all the wine drunk in that place had been poison! You must have thought I was a fine fool when you got away with the brat. You were the stronger that day in the forest. But now it’s my turn. I hold the cards now, and you’re done for, my beauty! It makes me laugh to think of it, the way you swallowed everything. I told you I was an actor, didn’t I? And that I’d played with Mademoiselle Mars, whoever she may be, and that I had to settle up with my landlord by tomorrow, February the fourth! Poor imbecile, not even sense enough to know the date of quarterday! And the beggarly sixty francs he’s brought me – too mean even to make it a hundred! And the high-minded sentiments! It made me laugh. I thought to myself, “All right, my beauty, I’ll lick your boots this morning and cut your heart out tonight!”’
Thénardier stopped for lack of breath, his narrow chest heaving like a bellows. His eyes shone with the ignoble triumph of a weak, cruel, and cowardly nature which at last has the power to humble what it fears: a dwarf setting his foot on the head of Goliath; a jackal sinking its teeth into the flank of an ailing bull, too near death to be able to defend itself but still alive enough to suffer.
Monsieur Leblanc had made no attempt to interrupt him, but now that he had stopped of his own accord he said:
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. You seem to be under a delusion. I’m a poor man, very far indeed from being a millionaire. I don’t know you. You’re confusing me with someone else.’
‘Ha!’ bellowed Thénardier. ‘You’re sticking to that, are you, you old mountebank? You don’t remember, eh? You’ve no idea who I am?’
‘None,’ said Monsieur Leblanc, with a cool courtesy that in the circumstances was singularly impressive. ‘But I have a very good idea what you are. You’re a scoundrel.’
As we all know, even the vilest creatures have their susceptibilities, even monsters are ticklish. The word ‘scoundrel’ caused the Thénardier woman to spring up off the bed. Thénardier snatched up a chair as though he meant to break it in pieces. ‘Stay where you are!’ he shouted to his wife, and again faced Monsieur Leblanc.
‘A scoundrel, is it? That’s what you rich call people like me. It’s true I’ve failed in business, I’m in hiding, I’ve no money in my pocket – so that makes me a scoundrel. I haven’t eaten for three days, so I’m a scoundrel! You keep yourselves warm with the best boots money can buy and fur-lined coats fit for an archbishop. You live in a first-floor apartment with a hall-porter, you stuff yourselves with truffles and asparagus at forty francs a bunch and green peas in January; and if you think the weather’s cold you look in the paper to see what the temperature is by Chevalier’s newfangled thermometer. But us, we’re our own thermometers, we don’t need to consult the newspaper to know how cold it is. We feel the blood freezing in our veins and we say, “There is no God!” And you come into the pig-sties we live in – pig-sties, that’s what they are – and call us scoundrels. But as under-dogs, we’re going to chew you up, we’re going to make a meal of you! Let me tell you this, my fine-feathered millionaire, I was a man in a good way of business, once a licensed innkeeper, an elector, a respectable citizen – and I dare say that’s more than you can say.’ He turned to the group of men by the door and added, quivering: ‘And he talks to me as though I was a pickpocket!’
In a fresh burst of fury, he turned back to Monsieur Leblanc.
‘And here’s something else for you, my noble philanthropist. I’m not just a nobody, a man without a name who goes about stealing children. I’m an ex-soldier of France. I should have had a medal. I fought at Waterloo, and I saved the life of a general called Count Something-or-other. He told me his name, but his infernal voice was so weak that I couldn’t hear it. I’d have sooner had his name than his thanks, because it would have helped me to find him again. That picture I’ve just shown you, painted by David, the famous artist, do you know what it is? It’s my portrait. He wanted to immortalize my feat of arms. I carried the general to safety on my back through the hail of musket-fire. That’s the story. Not that the general ever did anything for me, he was no better than the rest of you. All the same, I saved his life and I’ve got documents to prove it. I’m a veteran of Waterloo, hell and damnation! And now that I’ve had the politeness to tell you, let’s get this business over. I want money, a lot of money, the devil of a lot, or else by God, I’ll do for you!’
Marius had had time to bring his feelings under some control, and he was still listening. There could no longer be the least doubt that this was the Thénardier of his father’s message, and at the reference to the latter’s ingratitude, which he was on the point of so fatally justifying, he flinched, for it added to his uncertainties. In all Thénardier’s outpourings, the words and gestures, the fury blazing in his eyes; this explosion of an evil nature brazenly exposed, the mixture of bravado and abjectness, arrogance, pettiness, rage, absurdity; the hodge-podge of genuine distress, and lying sentiment, the shamelessness of a vicious man rejoicing in viciousness, the bare crudity of an ugly soul – in this eruption of all suffering and all hatred there was something which was hideous as evil itself and still as poignant as truth.
As the reader will have realized, the picture, supposedly by David, which he was asking Monsieur Leblanc to buy, was in fact nothing but the inn-sign he himself had painted, the sole relic he had preserved of his disaster in Montfermeil. Now that he was no longer standing in the way, Marius was able to study it, and he saw that the uncouth daub did indeed represent a battle, a man carrying another against a smoky background. Thénardier and Pontmercy, the gallant sergeant and the rescued officer. Marius was seized with a kind of delirium. The picture in some sort brought his father to life; it was no longer an inn-sign but a resurrection, the yawning of a tomb, the rising of a ghost. With throbbing temples Marius heard the sound of the guns at Waterloo, and it seemed to him that the bleeding figure of his father, so crudely depicted, had its eyes fixed upon him.
Thénardier had regained his breath.
‘Well,’ he said tersely, ‘have you anything to say before we go to work on you?’
Monsieur Leblanc said nothing. Amid the ensuing silence a hoarse voice proclaimed:
‘If there’s any chopping to be done, I’m your man!’
A huge, unshaven, and grimy face loomed up by the doorway, the lips parted to display not teeth but a row of stumps. It was the face of the man with the pole-axe.
‘Why have you taken your mask off?’ Thénardier shouted furiously.
For some moments, as it seemed, Monsieur Leblanc had been following Thénardier’s movements as, blind with rage and in the assurance that the door was guarded, and that there were nine of them to deal with a single unarmed man, he stamped up and down the room. In shouting at the man with the pole-axe he turned his back on the prisoner.
Monsieur Leblanc took instant advantage of this. Moving with astonishing speed, he thrust aside the table and chair and with a single bound had reached the window. It took him only a moment to open it and get a foot on the window-ledge. He was halfway through the window when six powerful hands laid hold of him and dragged him back. The three so-called furnace-men had flung themselves upon him. At the same moment the Thénardier woman grabbed him by the hair.
The commotion brought in the rest of the gang, who had been clustered in the corridor. The old man who had been lying on the bed, seemingly half-drunk, got up and staggered across the room with a roadmender’s hammer. One of the furnace-men, whose smeared face was momentarily visible in the candle-light, and whom Marius now recognized as Panchaud (alias Printanier or Bigrenaille) was flourishing a species of bludgeon with an iron knob at either end.
It was too much for Marius. ‘Forgive me, father,’ he murmured and his finger sought the trigger. But as he was about to fire Thénardier cried:
‘Don’t hurt him!’
Far from enraging Thénardier, the prisoner’s desperate bid to escape had sobered him. There were two men in Thénardier, the brute and the man of cunning. Until that moment, in the intoxication of his triumph, with the prey quiescent and seemingly at his mercy, the brute had prevailed; but now that the victim was showing signs of fight it was the man of cunning who took control.
‘Don’t hurt him,’ he repeated, and in doing so unwittingly scored a success. Marius delayed the firing of the shot, which, with this new development, he no longer felt to be a matter of instant necessity. It might happen, after all, that some chance would occur to spare him the hideous alternatives of allowing the girl’s father to perish or of destroying the saviour of his own father.
Meanwhile a prodigious struggle was in progress. Monsieur Leblanc had sent the old man reeling with a body-blow, and with further blows had felled two of his assailants to the ground. He was now kneeling with a knee on two other men, who lay groaning under the pressure as though it were that of a millstone. But the remaining four, gripping him by the arms and neck, prevented him from rising. Half victor and half vanquished, crushing some and stifled by others, vainly grappling with the men now piling upon him, Monsieur Leblanc vanished in the confusion of bodies like a boar under a baying pack of hounds.
Eventually they managed to drag him on to the bed nearest the window, treating him now with respect. The Thénardier woman had never loosed her grip of his hair.
‘You get out of it,’ Thénardier said. ‘You’ll tear your shawl.’
She obeyed instantly, growling like a she-wolf obeying its mate.
‘You others,’ said Thénardier, ‘search him.’
Monsieur Leblanc made no further resistance. They searched him. He had nothing on him except a leather purse containing six francs and a handkerchief. Thénardier put the handkerchief in his pocket.
‘No wallet?’ he asked.
‘No watch either,’ said one of the men.
‘It’s what you’d expect,’ said the masked man with the key, in a voice like that of a ventriloquist … ‘He’s an old hand.’
Thénardier, going across to the corner by the door, picked up a bundle of rope and tossed it to them.
‘Tie him to the foot of the bed,’ he said. He stood looking down at the old man, who was still lying motionless where he had been felled by Monsieur Leblanc’s fist. ‘Is Boulatruelle dead?’
‘He’s drunk, that’s all,’ said Bigrenaille.
‘Shift him out of the way,’ said Thénardier, and they rolled him over and dumped him by the heap of scrap-metal.
‘Look, Babet, why did you bring so many people?’ said Thénardier in an aside to the man with the cudgel.’ It’s more than we need.’
‘Couldn’t be helped,’ the other said.‘ They all wanted to be in on it. Business is slack just now.’
The bed in question was something like a hospital bed, with four thick, roughly squared wooden bed-posts. Monsieur Leblanc still made no resistance. They roped him solidly, standing upright, to the post furthest from the window and nearest to the hearth.
When this was done Thénardier moved a chair and sat down almost facing him. The transformation in Thénardier was extraordinary Within a few minutes his expression had changed from one of frenetic violence to a look of cool calculation. It was hard to believe that this politely smiling mouth was the same one that had been foaming in bestial frenzy so short a time before, and Marius, observing this sinister metamorphosis, felt the amazement of a man who sees a tiger transformed into an attorney.
‘Monsieur …’ Thénardier began. Breaking off, he waved away the men who were still holding Monsieur Leblanc. ‘Move back a little. I want to talk to the gentleman.’
They withdrew towards the door, and he began again.
‘Monsieur, you were foolish to try to jump out of the window. You might have broken your leg. Now, if you will allow me, we will discuss things quietly. But first I must tell you of something that has astonished me. Throughout this meeting you have not uttered a single cry.’
It was an undeniable fact, although Marius in his disturbed state had failed to notice it. The few words Monsieur Leblanc had spoken had been uttered without his having raised his voice. Even during the struggle by the window he had maintained a complete and singular silence.
‘You might have shouted for help,’ Thénardier went on.‘ I should not have been surprised if you had. It’s natural enough to do a bit of shouting when you find yourself surrounded by people whom you have cause to mistrust. We wouldn’t have tried to prevent you. We wouldn’t even have gagged you. And I’ll tell you why. It’s because this place is very sound-proof. There’s nothing else to be said for it, but there is that. You could explode a bomb in this room, and to the nearest police post it would sound like a drunkard’s snore. You could fire a cannon! So, you see, it’s a handy place. But you didn’t shout, and so much the better, I applaud your discretion. But shall I tell you the conclusion I draw from it? My dear sir, when anyone shouts for help who is most likely to answer? The police. And what comes after the police? – the law. So if you didn’t shout it’s because you are no more anxious to bring law and the police into the affair than we are ourselves. Which means – and I have long suspected this – that you have something to hide. The same applies to us. We have a common interest, and therefore we shall be able to come to terms.’
While he talked in this fashion, Thénardier, with his eyes intent upon Monsieur Leblanc, seemed to be seeking to bore into his very soul. In his choice of language, the crafty moderation, and the undertone of insolence, one might catch a glimpse of the man who by his own avowal had once ‘studied to be a priest’.
And to Marius, now that he was aware of it, it must be said that the prisoner’s strange conduct, his refusal to obey the natural impulse of any man in his situation, which amounted to a total disregard for his own safety, came as a painful shock. Thénardier’s shrewd observation served only to intensify the fog of mystery surrounding the aloof, enigmatic figure whom Courfeyrac had christened ‘Monsieur Leblanc’. But whatever he might be, as he stood there, bound with ropes and surrounded by a murderous gang, suspended as it were over a pit that seemed every minute to grow deeper, confronting with an equal impassiveness Thénardier’s venomous fury and his cool argument, Marius could not help admiring the dignified melancholy of his countenance. His was clearly a spirit inaccessible to fear and incapable of dismay. He was one of those men who rise above the astonishment of desperate circumstance. Great though this crisis was, inevitable though disaster seemed, there was in his eyes nothing of the wild stare of the drowning man who sinks for the last time.
Rising casually to his feet, Thénardier went over to the fireplace and moved the screen, unmasking the glowing brazier in which the red-hot chisel was plainly discernible, its surface flecked with small points of light. Then he resumed his seat facing Monsieur Leblanc
‘To continue,’ he said. ‘We can come to terms. Let us do so amicably. I was wrong to fly into a rage in the way I did. I lost my head and talked extravagantly. I went too far. For example, I said that because you are a millionaire I intended to demand a great deal of money, an enormous amount. But that would not be reasonable. However rich you may be, you have expenses, as who has not? I have no wish to ruin you. I’m not a bloodsucker. I’m not one of those people who, because they have the upper hand, make ridiculous demands. I am prepared to meet you half-way and make concessions on my side. All I am asking is two hundred thousand francs.’
Monsieur Leblanc said nothing. Thénardier continued:
‘As you see, I’m watering my wine to no small extent. I don’t know the state of your fortune, but I do know that you have little regard for money and that a man as addicted to good works as yourself can certainly spare two hundred thousand francs for the father of a family in unhappy circumstances. You are a reasonable man yourself, and you will not suppose that I have gone to the trouble of organizing this affair – and all these gentlemen will agree that it is well contrived – simply in order to be able to drink cheap wine and eat scrag-end of veal for the rest of my life. Two hundred thousand is what it is worth, and I give you my word that once this trifle has been handed over our business will be concluded and you will have nothing more to fear. You will, of course, point out that you haven’t got two hundred thousand francs on you. I am not so foolish as to have expected it. At the moment I am only asking one thing, that you will write a letter that I shall dictate.’
Here Thénardier paused. Speaking with particular emphasis and with a sidelong, smiling glance at the brazier, he said:
‘I must warn you that it will not do for you to pretend you can’t write.’
A Grand Inquisitor would have been envious of that smile.
Thénardier moved the table close to Monsieur Leblanc. He then got pen and ink and a sheet of paper out of the drawer, which he left open, revealing that it also contained a long-bladed knife. He thrust the paper towards Monsieur Leblanc.
‘Now write,’ he said.
For the first time the prisoner spoke.
‘How do you expect me to write with my arms bound?’
‘That’s true,’ said Thénardier. ‘I apologize.’ He turned to Bigrenaille. ‘Untie the gentleman’s right arm.’
The man did so, and when the prisoner’s right hand was free Thénardier dipped the pen in the ink and passed it to him.
‘You will please note, Monsieur, that you are completely at our mercy; but although no human power can save you, we should deeply regret having to proceed to unpleasant extremes. I do not know your name or your address, but I must warn you that you will remain bound until the messenger entrusted with the letter you are about to write has returned. I will now dictate.’
Monsieur Leblanc held the pen poised. ‘My dear daughter –’ Thénardier began, and at this the other started and stared at him. ‘No,’ said Thénardier. ‘Better make it, My dearest daughter.’ Monsieur Leblanc wrote accordingly, and he went on: ‘You are to come at once.’ Then he broke off. ‘I suppose you address her as tu?’
‘Who?’ asked Monsieur Leblanc.
‘The girl, of course,’ said Thénardier. ‘The child – the Lark.’
Monsieur Leblanc said without the least sign of emotion:
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Never mind,’ said Thénardier and resumed his dictation: ‘… come at once. I need you very urgently. The bearer of this note will bring you to me. I shall be waiting. You have nothing to fear.’ Again he changed his mind. ‘No. Leave out that last sentence. It might make her suspicious. And now you must sign it. What is your name?’
The prisoner put down his pen and asked:
‘Who is this letter for?’
‘You know perfectly well. It’s for the girl. I’ve already told you.’
It was apparent that Thénardier wished to avoid naming the girl. He had talked about ‘the child’ and ‘the Lark’, but, with the prudence of a wary man resolved to keep his secret from his accomplices, he had given her no precise name. To have done so would have been to deliver the whole business into their hands and tell them more than they needed to know. He repeated:
‘Go on – sign it. What is your name?’
‘Urbain Fabre,’ the prisoner replied.
With a catlike movement Thénardier plunged his hand in his pocket and whipped out the handkerchief taken from Monsieur Leblanc. He held it up to the light of the candle, inspecting it for initials.
‘U.F.,’ he said. ‘That’s right. Urbain Fabre. Well, sign the letter U.F.’
The prisoner did so.
‘And now give it to me. It needs two hands to fold it, so I’ll attend to that myself. Good,’ said Thénardier.’ Now you must address it – to Mademoiselle Fabre, at the place where you live. I know it isn’t far from here, somewhere near Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, because that’s where you attend Mass; but I don’t know the street. I see you understand the position. You haven’t lied to me about your name, so you won’t do so about your address. Write it yourself.’
The prisoner reflected for a moment, then took up the pen and wrote:
‘To Mademoiselle Fabre, care of Monsieur Urbain Fabre, 17 Rue Saint-Dominique-d’Enfer.’
Thénardier snatched up the letter with a sort of feverish excitement. ‘Wife,’ he called, and she hurried forward. ‘Here it is. You know what you have to do. There’s a fiacre down below. Get off at once and come back quick as you can.’
He turned to the man with the pole-axe.
‘As you’ve taken your mask off you might as well go with her. Get up behind the fiacre. You know where it’s waiting?’
‘Yes,’ said the man, and dropping his pole-axe in a corner, he followed the woman out of the room. Thrusting his head round the door, Thénardier shouted after her: ‘Whatever you do, don’t lose that letter. Remember it’s worth two hundred thousand francs!’
‘Don’t worry,’ her hoarse voice replied. ‘I’ve pushed it down my front.’
In less than a minute they heard the cracking of a whip, which rapidly died away.
‘Good,’ grunted Thénardier. ‘They aren’t wasting any time. At that rate she’ll be back in three-quarters of an hour.’
He moved one of the chairs and sat down with his arms folded and his muddy boots stretched out towards the brazier.
‘My feet are cold,’ he muttered.
Five members of the gang were now left in the room with Thénardier and the prisoner. The men, with their masks or black-smeared faces, might have been taken for coal-miners, Negroes or demons, according to taste, and they gave the impression that they treated crime as a business, going about it calmly, without anger or pity, indeed with a sort of boredom. They were huddled silently in a corner, like so many animals. Thénardier toasted his feet. The prisoner had relapsed into silence. A gloomy quiet had succeeded the furious hubbub of so short a time before. The candle, its tallow spreading like a mushroom, scarcely lighted the big garret; the brazier was dying down, and the heads of the men cast monstrous shadows on the walls and ceiling. No sound was to be heard except the breathing of the old drunkard, now fast asleep.
Marius waited in a state of anxiety which everything served to increase. The puzzle was more mystifying than ever. Who was the ‘child’ whom Thénardier had also called ‘the Lark’? Was it his ‘Ursula’? The prisoner had seemed quite unaffected by the mention of the Lark, and had answered in the most natural of voices, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ At least the riddle of the initials was now resolved. The U.F. stood for Urbain Fabre, and Ursula was not Ursula. This was the one thing that was clear to Marius. He stayed at his observation-post, kept there by a sort of hideous fascination, almost incapable of movement or reflection, as though paralysed by the abominable things he had witnessed. He was waiting upon events, in any case, unable to collect his thoughts or decide what he should do.
‘At least,’ he reflected, ‘if she is the Lark I shall know it, because the woman is going to bring her here. That will settle the matter. I will sacrifice my life to save her, if need be. Nothing shall prevent me.’
Nearly half an hour passed. Thénardier seemed lost in his own dark thoughts. The prisoner did not move. Nevertheless it seemed to Marius that now and then a slight, furtive sound came from his direction. But suddenly Thénardier turned to him.
‘Monsieur Fabre,’ he said, ‘I may as well tell you this at once.’
Marius pricked up his ears. It sounded like the beginning of a disclosure.
‘My wife will be back, we have only to wait. I believe the Lark is truly your daughter, and it’s only right that you should have her. But listen. My wife will take her the letter. I told her to dress herself respectably, as you saw, so the young lady will have no misgivings about accompanying her. They will get into the fiacre, with my friend up at the back. But another cab will be waiting at a spot outside one of the gates with two excellent horses. The girl will be transferred to this, with my friend, and my wife will come back here to report that everything is in order. No one is going to harm your young lady. She’ll be taken to a safe place and returned to you when the two hundred thousand francs has been paid. But if you should do anything to bring about my arrest, that will be unfortunate for the Lark. You understand?’
The prisoner said nothing. After a pause Thénardier concluded:
‘You see, it’s quite simple. Nothing bad will happen unless you bring it about. I’m only warning you.’
He paused again, and again the prisoner said nothing.
‘As soon as my wife reports that the Lark is on her way,’ said Thénardier, ‘we will release you and you will be free to sleep in your own bed. As you see, we have no evil intentions.’
Marius was so appalled that his heart seemed to stop beating. The girl was not to be brought here but conveyed to some unknown destination! He could not seriously doubt who the girl was. And what was he to do? Fire the warning shot and deliver these villains into the hands of the police? But the man who had gone with the woman would still be free, and he would have the girl; and Marius recalled Thénardier’s ominous words – that will be unfortunate for the Lark’… It was not only his father’s injunction that now made Marius hold his hand, but the danger that threatened his beloved.
The time dragged by. His dilemma seemed more hideous with every minute that passed. Marius reviewed the heart-rending possibilities, seeking desperately for a ray of hope and finding none, the tumult in his mind strangely contrasting with the funereal silence of the room.
At length the silence was broken by the sound of the house-door opening and closing. The prisoner stirred in his bonds.
‘Here she is,’ said Thénardier.
And a moment later the woman rushed into the room, flushed and breathless, her eyes glaring, banging her large hands against her thighs.
‘It was a fake address!’ she cried.
Her escort, following her in, picked up his pole-axe.
‘A fake?’ Thénardier repeated.
‘There’s no Monsieur Urbain Fabre at 17, Rue Saint-Dominique! They’ve never heard of him!’ She spluttered and went on: ‘The old man’s been fooling you, Monsieur Thénardier. You’re too good, that’s the trouble. Me, I’d have carved his face up for a start, and if he still wouldn’t talk I’d have roasted him until he told us where the girl is and how to get the money. But men haven’t the sense of women. There’s no Monsieur Fabre at Number 17. It’s a big house with a courtyard and a door-keeper and everything, and I tipped him and talked to him and his wife, who is a fine-looking woman, and they know nothing about him.’
Marius breathed again. So the girl at least was safe – Ursula or the Lark, he no longer knew what to call her.
While his infuriated wife was vociferating, Thénardier had seated himself on the table. He sat there in silence for some moments, swinging his right leg and gazing with a savage satisfaction at the brazier. Then he turned to the prisoner and said slowly, and in a tone of singular ferocity:
‘A false address. What did you expect to gain by that?’
‘Time!’ cried the prisoner in a ringing voice, and at the same moment he shook off the ropes that bound him. They had been cut. He was now only tied to the bed by one leg.
Before the other men had had time to realize what was happening he had reached out a hand to the brazier and then again stood upright. Thénardier, the woman, and the party of ruffians, clustered in stupefaction at the other end of the room, saw him defiantly facing them, holding the red-hot chisel by its wooden handle above his head.
It was revealed at the judicial inquiry into the affair at the Gorbeau tenement that the police, when they searched the garret, found a large coin which had been cut and worked in a particular fashion. It was one of those marvels of craftsmanship fashioned under cover of darkness, and for the purposes of darkness, with the patience engendered by imprisonment, and which are intended solely to serve as instruments of escape. These ugly and delicate products of immense skill are to the jeweller’s art what the argot of the underworld is to poetry. There are Benvenuto Cellinis in the prisons, just as in our common slang there are Villons. The wretch determined to escape contrives, sometimes with no other tool than a worn knife-blade, to slice a copper coin in two thin sheets; he hollows them out without disturbing the design impressed on them, and then cuts a thread so that the two sheets can be screwed together, forming a box that he can open at will. Within the box a watchspring is concealed; and a watchspring, properly handled, will cut through a thick rope or an iron bar. The poor devil seems to possess nothing more than a penny piece, but he holds the key to liberty. The two halves of a coin of this kind were discovered under the bed by the window, and near them a tiny blue-steel saw which fitted inside. It is probable that the prisoner managed to conceal it in his hand while he was being searched and later unscrewed it when his hand was freed. He had used the saw to cut through the bonds, which would explain the slight sounds and furtive movements noticed by Marius; but he could not bend down for fear of giving himself away, and so had not been able to cut the rope binding his left leg.
The gang had recovered from this first surprise.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Bigrenaille to Thénardier. ‘He’s still tied by one leg, and I guarantee he won’t get out of that. I tied it myself.’
The prisoner now addressed them.
‘You’re a poor lot,’ he said, ‘but my own life is not much worth defending. As for making me talk – or making me write anything I don’t want to write, or say anything I don’t want to say … Well, look!’
He drew up the sleeve covering his left arm and, holding it out, pressed the red-hot chisel against the bare skin.
The hiss of burnt flesh was audible, and a smell associated with torture-chambers spread through the room. Marius was sickened with horror, and even the ruffians gasped. But the expression of this remarkable elderly man scarcely altered. There was no hatred in the impassive gaze he directed at Thénardier, and no trace of physical agony in its serene nobility. In great and lofty natures the anguish of the flesh merely exalts the spirit, just as a soldiers’ mutiny obliges the commander to show himself in his true colours.
‘Poor fools,’ he said, ‘you need no more fear me than I fear you.’ Withdrawing the chisel from his arm, he flung it through the open window, and the horrid implement vanished in the darkness, to fall hissing into the snow. ‘Now you can do what you like with me.’
He was quite defenceless.
‘Get hold of him,’ said Thénardier.
Two of the men grasped him by the shoulders, and the masked man with a ventriloquist’s voice took up his position in front of him, ready at the slightest movement to stun him with a blow of the huge key he carried.
Marius heard a sound of whispering immediately below him, so close to the partition that he could not see the speakers.
‘There’s only one thing for it –’
‘Slit his throat!’
‘That’s it!’
Husband and wife were taking counsel together. Thénardier walked slowly over to the table and got out the knife.
Marius’s hand was playing with the pistol-butt; his dilemma was now at its crisis. For an hour or more he had been tormented by the two voices of his conscience, one urging him to respect his father’s wishes and the other insisting that he must save the prisoner. Both voices still clamoured within him, and his anguish was extreme. Until that moment he had clung to the faint hope that something would happen to reconcile those opposing impulses, but there had been nothing. Now the peril was imminent and he could delay no longer. Thénardier, knife in hand, stood hesitating a few paces from the prisoner.
Marius gazed wildly about him in the extremity of despair and suddenly he started. A brighter ray of moonlight, falling on the writing-table immediately behind him, shone upon a sheet of paper as though to bring it to his notice. It bore the sentence scrawled by the Thénardier girl that morning to prove that she could write. He could make out the bold, ill-written words:
‘Watch out, the bogies are around.’
Instantly he saw what he must do. This was the solution of his problem, the means of saving both victim and assassin. Kneeling down, he reached for the paper. He softly detached a piece of plaster from the partition, wrapped the page round it, and flung it through the aperture so that it landed in the middle of the Thénardiers’ room.
He was just in time. Thénardier, having overcome his last misgivings or scruples, was advancing upon the prisoner when he was checked by a sudden exclamation from his wife:
‘Something fell!’ she cried.
‘What do you mean?’
She darted forward, picked up the small missive, and handed it to her husband.
‘How did this get here?’ he asked.
‘How do you think? Through the window, of course!’
‘That’s right,’ said Bigrenaille. ‘I saw it.’
Thénardier hastily unfolded the paper and studied it by the light of the candle.
‘It’s Éponine’s handwriting, by God!’ He signed to his wife to read the message and said in a hoarse voice: ‘Quick. The ladder. We’ll leave the mouse in the trap and clear out!’
‘Without cutting his throat?’ his wife demanded.
‘No time.’
‘How do we go?’ asked Bigrenaille.
‘Through the window. If Ponine threw the message in that way it means that side of the house isn’t guarded.’
The masked ventriloquist dropped his key and, raising his arms above his head, rapidly clapped his hands three times without speaking. It was a call to action. The men holding the prisoner let go of him; the rope ladder was swiftly unrolled and let down from the window, with its hooks secured to the window-ledge. The prisoner paid no attention to what was going on, seeming plunged in thought, or in prayer.
Directly the ladder was ready Thénardier called to his wife, ‘Come on!’ and made a dash for the window; but as he was about to climb through Bigrenaille grabbed him roughly by the collar.
‘Not so fast, my old joker. We go first.’
‘We go first,’ the other men shouted.
‘You’re being childish,’ said Thénardier. ‘We’re wasting time. They can’t be far off.’
‘Then,’ said one of the men, ‘we’ll draw lots for who’s to go first.’
‘Are you crazy?’ spluttered Thénardier. ‘Are you raving mad? We’ve got the law on our heels and you want to stand round drawing lots out of a hat!’
‘Perhaps you would like to borrow my hat,’ said a voice from the doorway.
They swung round and saw that it was Javert. He stood there holding out his hat with a smile.
Javert had posted his men at nightfall and had taken up his own position behind the trees in the Rue de la Barrière-des-Gobelins, facing the Gorbeau tenement on the other side of the boulevard. He had intended to commence operations by ‘pocketing’ the two girls who were supposed to be on watch, but he had only succeeded in picking up Azelma. Éponine had deserted her post and they could not find her. Javert, waiting for the signal, had been considerably perturbed by the coming and going of the fiacre. Finally he lost patience, and being now convinced that he had uncovered a hornet’s nest and that his luck was in – for he had recognized several of the men who entered the house – he had decided to go in without waiting for the pistol-shot, using Marius’s key.
He had arrived at the crucial moment. The startled desperadoes snatched up the weapons they had just let fall and clustered together in readiness to defend themselves – seven men of terrifying aspect, armed with pole-axe and cudgel, shears, pincers and hammers, and Thénardier brandishing his knife. His wife had snatched up a huge slab of paving stone lying by the window which their daughters used as a stool.
Javert replaced his hat on his head and advanced two paces into the room with his stick under his arm and his sword still in its sheath.
‘Take it easy,’ he said. ‘You can’t escape through the window. Better go out through the door, you’ll find it less unhealthy. There are seven of you and fifteen of us. No point in turning it into a brawl. Let’s all be sensible.’
Bigrenaille produced a pistol from under his smock and thrust it into Thénardier’s hand, murmuring as he did so:
‘That’s Javert, a man I’m afraid to shoot at. Will you dare?’
‘By God I will!’ said Thénardier.
He levelled the weapon at Javert, who was not more than three paces away from him. Javert looked steadily at him and simply said:
‘Better not. It won’t fire anyway.’
Thénardier pulled the trigger. The pistol did not fire.
‘What did I tell you?’ said Javert.
Bigrenaille flung down the bludgeon he was carrying.
‘You’re the king of devils!’ he cried. ‘I give in.’
Javert looked round at the others.
‘And the rest of you?’
They nodded.
‘Good,’ said Javert calmly. ‘Now we’re being sensible, like I said.’
‘There’s just one thing I ask,’ said Bigrenaille, ‘that I’ll be allowed tobacco while I’m in solitary.’
‘Agreed,’ said Javert, and, turning, he shouted: ‘You can come in now.’
A party consisting of sergents de ville armed with swords and policemen with truncheons entered the garret. They seized hold of the gangsters, and that dense assembly of bodies by the light of a single candle plunged the place in shadow.
‘Handcuff the lot of them,’ ordered Javert.
And as this was being done a voice which was not a man’s, but was scarcely recognizable as that of a woman, shouted:
‘Try to come near me!’
The Thénardier woman had taken up her stand in the corner by the window. She had shrugged off her shawl but still had on her hat. Her husband was crouched behind her, half-hidden by the cast-off shawl, and she was covering him with her body, standing with the paving-stone raised above her head like a giantess about to hurl a rock.
‘Take care!’ she cried.
They drew back towards the door, leaving a cleared space in the middle of the garret. The woman glanced at the men who had allowed themselves to be overpowered and muttered with an oath:
‘Cowardly swine!’
Javert walked across the empty space while she glared at him.
‘If you come any nearer I’ll smash you!’
‘A warrior,’ said Javert, ‘You bear yourself like a man, Mistress, but I have a woman’s claws.’ And he continued to advance.
Hair disordered and eyes blazing, she spread her legs, bent backwards and flung the slab of stone. Javert ducked and it passed over his head. It crashed against the wall, bringing down a shower of plaster, and rebounding, came to rest behind him. At the same moment Javert reached the couple. He clapped one heavy hand on the woman’s shoulder and the other on her husband’s head.
‘Handcuffs!’ he shouted.
The police in a body poured back into the room and within moments the order had been carried out. The woman, defeated at last, stared down at her manacled hands and those of her husband, and sank weeping to her knees.
‘My daughters!’ she cried.
‘We’ve got them,’ said Javert.
Meanwhile the police, having discovered the drunken man prostrate behind the door, were shaking him into life. He opened his eyes and stammered:
‘Is it over, Jondrette?’
‘Over and done with,’ said Javert.
The handcuffed men, three with masks and three with blackened faces, still had the look of ghosts.
‘Leave the masks on,’ said Javert. Looking them over like Frederick the Great reviewing his troops at Potsdam, he greeted them in turn: ‘Good evening to you, Bigrenaille – Brujon – Deux-Milliards …’ And to the masked men, ‘How nice to see you, Gueulemer – Babet – Claquesous.’
He then noticed the prisoner, who from the time the police had entered the room had stood with his head bowed and without speaking a word.
‘Untie the gentleman,’ he said. ‘But no one’s to leave until I give the order.’
After which he seated himself at the table, methodically wiped the pen and trimmed the candle, and taking a sheet of official paper from his pocket set to work on his preliminary report. But after writing the opening lines, which were no more than a routine formula, he looked up.
‘Ask the gentleman to step forward.’
The police stared about them.
‘Well, where is he?’ Javert demanded.
He was gone. The prisoner – Monsieur Leblanc, Monsieur Urbain Fabre, the father of Ursula or the Lark – had disappeared.
The door was guarded, but the window was not. Directly his leg was untied, and while Javert was otherwise engaged, he had taken advantage of the confusion, the darkness, and the crowded state of the room to make his departure by that means. A man rushed to the window and looked out. There was no one to be seen. The rope-ladder was still swinging.
‘Devil take it!’ said Javert with tight lips. ‘He must have been the best of the lot.’
On the evening following these events a youngster who seemed to have come from the Pont d’Austerlitz hurried along a narrow street in the direction of the Fontainebleau barrier. It was dark. The boy was pale and thin and wretchedly clad, wearing cotton trousers in that month of February, but he was singing at the top of his voice.
At the corner of the Rue du Petit-Banquier an old woman was ferreting in a garbage-heap by the light of a street lamp. The boy bumped into her and started back.
‘Blimey, I thought it was an enormous – an ENORMOUS dog!’ The emphasis he laid on the word as he sardonically repeated it is best conveyed by capital letters.
The old woman straightened up angrily.
‘Little demon!’ she shouted. ‘If I hadn’t been bending I know where I’d have put my foot.’
‘Now then!’ said the boy, already some way past her. ‘Perhaps I wasn’t all that wrong after all.’
The old woman, spluttering with indignation, seemed about to go after him, and the pale glow of the lamp fell upon her furious, wrinkled face with crowsfeet at the corners of the mouth. Her body was lost in shadow so that only the face was visible, and it was like a mask of decrepitude plucked out of the darkness by a beam of light. The boy considered her.
‘Madame,’ he said, ‘does not possess the style of beauty that attracts me.’
He went on his way and again began to sing:
The merry monarch, Coupdesabot
Was plump and very short, and so –
Here he broke off. He had arrived at the door of No. 50–52, and finding it locked he proceeded to kick it with a vigour more suited to the man’s boots he was wearing than to his child’s feet. The old woman caught up with him, shouting and gesticulating.
‘Now what is it? What are you doing? Are you trying to break down the door?’ He went on kicking and she screeched: ‘That’s no way to treat a respectable house!’
And suddenly she recognized him.
‘So it’s you, you little pest!’
‘Why, it’s the old dame,’ said the boy. ‘Good evening, Ma Bougon. I’ve come to call on my ancestors.’
The old woman responded with a grimace, unfortunately wasted in the darkness, which was a wonderful mixture of malice, decay, and ugliness.
‘There’s no one there, stupid.’
‘Why, where’s my father?’
‘In prison – at La Force.’
‘You don’t say! And my mother?’
‘She’s in the Saint-Lazare.’
‘Well, what about my sisters?’
‘They’re in the Madelonnettes.’
The boy scratched his head, stared at Ma’am Bougon, and whistled.
‘Ah, well!’
Then he turned on his heels and she stood watching on the doorstep while he disappeared beyond the black shapes of the elms shaking in the winter wind, his clear young voice again raised in song.
The merry monarch Coupdesabot
Was plump and very short, and so
He went out shooting on a pair
Of stilts to make the people stare,
And spread his legs to let them through,
And charged the customers deux sous.